According to the antirealist argument known as the pessimistic induction, the history of science is a graveyard of dead scientific theories and abandoned theoretical posits. Support for this pessimistic picture of the history of science usually comes from a few case histories, such as the demise of the phlogiston theory and the abandonment of caloric as the substance of heat. In this article, I wish to take a new approach to examining the ‘history of science as a graveyard (...) of theories’ picture. Using JSTOR Data for Research and Springer Exemplar, I present new lines of evidence that are at odds with this pessimistic picture of the history of science. When rigorously tested against the historical record of science, I submit, the pessimistic picture of the history of science as a graveyard of dead theories and abandoned posits may turn out to be no more than a philosophers’ myth. (shrink)

Statues, monuments, cenotaphs and markers litter the landscape of Plato’s Phaedrus. By drawing together these numerous references and examining the economy of these silent symbols, we can gain an insight into Plato’s project, especially as it relates to questions of narrative, speech and writing. While the examination of the myth of Theuth is familiar to scholars of both Plato and Derrida, what is often overlooked is the way in which writing and speech are represented in the text by monuments, which (...) speak through silence, and more often than not memorialize those who can no longer speak, or whose speech is, like themselves, rendered dead in writing. Like the pharmakon of writing itself, statuary operates within the economy of signs, an economy of reminding, which within the system of metaphysics leads not to the transcendent realm of ideas but ties us to the realm of opinion. However, by examining the role of myth and its relation to statuary in the Phaedrus, a new interpretation emerges, which allows for myth and the silent voices of the dead as a way to initiation. (shrink)

The dissertation explores the philosophical, literary, and stylistic similarities between the twentieth century American writer Sherwood Anderson and the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. These similarities suggest that the Ohio writer's work and aesthetic were deeply influenced by the Danish thinker, and the connection between them lies in the immigrant rural religious communities of the American Middle West. Ultimately, these interrelations reveal a "religious-aesthetic" unique to the entire range of Midwestern literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and they (...) also reveal a politics and an aesthetic of Midwestern art available yet today. (shrink)

Farrell, Marie T Review(s) of: How to read a graveyard: Journeys in the company of the dead, by Peter Stanford (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp.263, $32.95.

The German word Festschrift has become the universally accepted term for a published collection of legal essays written by several authors to honour a distinguished jurist or mark a significant legal event. The genre dates back to the mid‐19th century on the Continent, but until recently it has made little impression on the literature of the common law. Less than a dozen legal Festschriften had been published in the United Kingdom up to 1968, but since then more than a hundred (...) legal Festschriften have appeared. This article traces the rise of the legal Festschrift in the United Kingdom, and attempts to account for its recent popularity. The nature of legal Festschriften, and the processes and problems of their production, are addressed. Emphasis is placed on the systemic failure to index contributions to legal Festschriften. This gap in the bibliographic resources of the common law consigns an enormous amount of scholarship to oblivion; hence the reference in the title to ‘graveyards of scholarship’. An indication of the magnitude of this problem is that the total number of contributions to legal Festschriften between 1969 and 2000 almost equals the total number of articles published in three leading British law reviews over the same period. The article concludes that the failure to index contributions to legal Festschriften by author and subject matter is lamentable, and undercuts the reasons for publishing legal Festschriften in the first place. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

nos últimos anos, John McDowell tem proposto uma concepção de filosofia em que o objetivo da disciplina não é oferecer teses substanciais, mas antes revelar modos de pensar e premissas ocultas que estão na base da filosofia construtiva. Esta visão terapêutica tem sido chamada ‘quietismo’ e deve muito a algumas idéias favoritas de Wittgenstein ao longo de toda a sua vida. No entanto, a obra de Wittgenstein (e, talvez, também a de McDowell) parece oscilar entre duas compreensões de quietismo: pode-se (...) ser quietista por não macular aquilo que é mais importante com discussões explícitas ou pode-se ser quietista por não ter nada a dizer. Argumentaremos que o segundo tipo do quietismo não implica recusar em se ocupar com a filosofia do passado, nem tampouco adotar uma atitude contemplativa. A concentração sobre o particular, em ética tanto quanto em qualquer outra área da filosofia, é suficiente para minar as ambições universalistas da filosofia tradicional e descortinar um aumento na ação filosófica. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El uso de analogías en bioética es muy frecuente. Dado que son instrumentos especialmente eficaces desde un punto de vista retórico, resulta fundamental determinar bajo qué condiciones la formulación de analogías constituye un recurso discursivo legítimo. En este artículo, distinguimos entre usos no-discursivos y usos discursivos de las analogías, y dentro de estos últimos, entre usos explicativos y usos argumentativos. En base a esta clasificación, proponemos distintos conjuntos de criterios para determinar si una analogía particular constituye un recurso discursivo (...) legítimo o no. Para ello, ilustramos brevemente nuestra clasificación mediante algunos ejemplos tomados del reciente debate sobre los biobancos.ABSTRACT: Analogies are frequently used in bioethics. As they are particularly effective as rhetorical tools, it is essential to determine under which conditions they can be said to be a legitimate discursive resource. In this paper we distinguish between nondiscursive uses and discursive uses of analogies and, within the latter, between explanatory uses and argumentative uses. Taking this classification as a basis, we provide different sets of criteria for determining whether or not a particular analogy constitutes a legitimate discursive resource. In distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate analogies, we briefly illustrate our classification by some examples from recent literature on biobanks. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El uso de analogías en bioética es muy frecuente. Dado que son instrumentos especialmente eficaces desde un punto de vista retórico, resulta fundamental determinar bajo qué condiciones la formulación de analogías constituye un recurso discursivo legítimo. En este artículo, distinguimos entre usos no-discursivos y usos discursivos de las analogías, y dentro de estos últimos, entre usos explicativos y usos argumentativos. En base a esta clasificación, proponemos distintos conjuntos de criterios para determinar si una analogía particular constituye un recurso discursivo (...) legítimo o no. Para ello, ilustramos brevemente nuestra clasificación mediante algunos ejemplos tomados del reciente debate sobre los biobancos.ABSTRACT: Analogies are frequently used in bioethics. As they are particularly effective as rhetorical tools, it is essential to determine under which conditions they can be said to be a legitimate discursive resource. In this paper we distinguish between nondiscursive uses and discursive uses of analogies and, within the latter, between explanatory uses and argumentative uses. Taking this classification as a basis, we provide different sets of criteria for determining whether or not a particular analogy constitutes a legitimate discursive resource. In distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate analogies, we briefly illustrate our classification by some examples from recent literature on biobanks. (shrink)

I propose that removed statues be placed in a monument graveyard. This would transfigure a monument, whose purpose is to honour a person or evoke a “glorious past,” into a memorial, whose purpose is to help us grieve. Thus, we dethrone the man who committed violent racists acts, like Edward Colson, and place the statue’s corpse in a graveyard. This repurposing will give old monuments new meanings more in line with our contemporary values.

This book offers a close and rigorous examination of the arguments for and against scientific realism and introduces key positions in the scientific realism/antirealism debate, which is one of the central debates in contemporary philosophy of science. On the one hand, scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true because, if they were not even approximately true, they would not be able to explain and predict natural phenomena with such impressive (...) accuracy. On the other hand, antirealists argue that the success of science does not warrant belief in the approximate truth of our best scientific theories. This is because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were once successful but were later discarded. The author eventually settles on a middle ground position between scientific realism and antirealism called "relative realism.". (shrink)

Chronology of Einstein's mistakes -- I will resign the game -- A lovely time in Berne -- And yet it moves -- If I have seen farther -- A storm broke loose in my mind -- Motions of inanimate, small, suspended bodies -- What is the light quantum? -- The argument is jolly and beguiling -- Suddenly I had an idea -- The theory is of incomparable beauty -- The world is a madhouse -- Does God play dice? -- The (...) graveyard of disappointed hopes -- Post-mortem. (shrink)

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

This study evaluated how call center agents manage their emotions when interacting with customers with different emotional states. The coping mechanisms employees develop through experience can impact their communication and satisfaction with customer service. A study was conducted using a descriptive-correlational design in three Business Process Outsourcing companies in Cebu City, Philippines. The study aimed to determine employees' agreement and effectiveness in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. An online sample size calculator was used to gather data, and 150 (...) respondents were chosen out of 243 call center agents. The data was analyzed using simple frequency, percentage, weighted mean, and ANOVA type III. The study indicates that age is crucial in the respondents' self-management (F ratio= 3,146, p= .412). This suggests that BPO employees become better at managing themselves as they get older. Additionally, the study respondents' monthly income significantly impacts their social awareness level (F ratio= 5,144, p= .040). This means that those with higher incomes tend to have greater social awareness than those with lower incomes. The BPO industry should prioritize candidates with high emotional intelligence during hiring. They can better adapt to the fast-paced work environment. Graveyard shift workers should receive higher wages and benefits. Employees should attend workshops on management, leadership, and emotional intelligence. Annual team-building events should also be considered for a positive work environment. (shrink)

Modem theories of metaphor seem to be pretty unanimous in taking the "death" of a metaphor literally. By doing so they too easily wipe out sedimented, past meanings and so ignore semantic memory. A further consequence of this stand is that meanings are reduced to a one-dimensional (either metaphoric or literal), static structure. This article, in a procedure that resembles a sort of "archeology of meaning," is critical of such an attitude, for which conventionalization of metaphors means their burial in (...) the graveyard of language. It attempts to provide a ground for the assumption that labeling of metaphors as "dead" is not lethal, for their meanings can be revitalized and recreated, according to our linguistic competence, diachronic perspective, interests, and needs. It contains implicit support for the thesis that semantic mechanisms are flexible, dynamic, and subject to evolutionary growth. Not even the death of a metaphor can be exempt from this overall scheme. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, (...) every project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

It will be a wrong judgment to consider grave stones as an ordinary tradition. When it is viewed in terms of history, art and culture, it can be seen that especially Turkish grave stones are record drawings that include many types of arts and artists’ labor, shed our culture and history and that is precious and unique. Grave stones are the documents that transfer not only the national culture but also transfer people’s beliefs, problems, fears, sadness and different feelings, who (...) breathe the same air and live in the same places. Because of this reason, grave stones are the cultural features that are shaped according to the differences in culture and decorated with life styles. Of course, Of course, having been applied plenty of traditional Turkish plastic arts on the tombstones, have all contributed to the diversity of tombstones in terms of composition and motifs. Rich craftsmanship of gravestones and sarcophagus in the second Bayezid graveyard is almost like an open air museum that shows Turkish motifs. While scarping was used for making gravestones are scarping, and painting were used as the main decoration tecnique is seen on foot stone with the painting technique, inscriptions of stones were coloured. Most of the inscriptions and decorations are relieved. Decoration subjects seen on gravestones are phytomorphic, geometric, objective and calligraphic. On the other side, these tombstones include wide knowledge about the socio-economic, cultural and regional headgears. When evaluating the information on the inscriptions, it can be obtained knowledge about the health conditions or epidemics in that period. Adolf Ebeling, article titled “Turkish cemeteries” in the 1882 the year Gartenlaube journal, when talking about the importance given to the graves by Turks, to say that the Turkish burial tomb can be an example to the world is no need to say more about it. The thomstones as the verbal means service to rebuilt the material world where the man has saved so far and the culture developing in accordance with this. The written tombstones which were formed by the individuals’ cherishing and remembering desires that the cultural, religious and traditional ones shaped, are the carrier elements of the values wich will provide to understand the sterotype requirements and ideologies within the cultural structure. Looking at the overall structure of the Turkish tombstones form shows major differences in male and female gravestones. In the Turkish tombstone tradition, women's elegance, finesse and beauty is reflected as a form of artwork. In fact, women in the Ottoman Empire, although excluded from the social life in very marginalized, especially in women flashy decorations tombstones, can be considered as an indication value which is given to women but unspoken. Since the tombstones have dates, they hold the distinction of being a document for ethnographic and art works. Moreover, inscribed tombstones are living evidences in order to prove that Turkish people lived in this land and also they have ethnographic value. Therefore, tombstones are important while the histories of cities, villages or boroughs are preparing. In short, tombstones are the common products of the environment that are built, religious beliefs, traditions, art, natural, social and economic conditions of the century. In this case they hold key for our culture history in addition to our art history. In this study, besides the effects of Turkish grave stones on our beliefs and daily lives, fruit patterns on the stones are also examined. The reflections traditional architectural and handicrafts motifs and the religious believes on the Turkish ornament art are explained by the examples chosen among gravestones in İstanbul II. Beyazıt Cemetery. In the colloquial language what fruit motifs mean in folk songs ang manias and how it is reflected on the ornaments of grave stones are investigated. (shrink)

This article evaluates the moral status of hominins, and obligations we may have towards them. In exploring these ethical considerations, I consider one of the most recent hominin finds: the ‘graveyard’ of Homo naledi in the Dinaledi caves at the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. I argue that findings about H. naledi establish a pro tanto duty not to excavate their remains.

Eight philosophers discuss the works of the best-selling novelist and graphic novelist, including The Graveyard Book, Coraline and Good Omens and reveal their thoughts on the intersection of fantasy and reality and whether the unknown is as ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RANSOM'S GOD WITHOUT THUNDER: REMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE AND POETICIZING THE SACRED Gary M. Ciuba Kent State University From tree-lined Vanderbilt University of 1930 Nashville, the modernist poet and critic John Crowe Ransom longed to hear in his imagination the God who thundered fiercely in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The God of sacrifice who in Homer's Iliad, "his thunder striking terror," received libations from the warring armies (230). The God (...) of jealousy who in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound "drove the sleepless thunderbolt, / plunged the fire spurting shaft/ down" on Typhon for defying heaven with his violence (46). The God of vengeance who in Ovid's Metamorphoses sent "blinding / Thunder [to shake] Olympus, and Pelim / Thrust down by heaven's bolt crashed over Ossa" when the giants piled mountain upon mountain to reach Jove's throne (35). The God ofviolence who in Psalm 78:48 delivered the cattle ofthe obstinate Egyptians "to the hail, and their flocks to hot thunderbolts" or who in 1 Samuel 7:10 "thundered with great thunder" to smite the Philistines. In God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy Ransom attacked the modern heresy that deprived the deity ofsuch awful might and summoned Americans to live under a new myth of sacred violence. IfRansom listened with the ears ofthe Methodist faith in which he had been raised, he might have heard how the god of old was muted at the university where he studied and later taught. Ten years before Ransom was born, Methodist-sponsored Vanderbilt had eliminated the lectureship of naturalist Alexander Winched because hisPre-Adamites had challenged the Creation story in Genesis. But in 1914, when Ransom returned to his alma Gary M. Ciuba41 mater to begin more than two decades of teaching there, the Methodists ended their affiliation with Vanderbilt because of a dispute about church governance of the university (Bailey 9-10, 31-4). When the Scopes Trial caused a furor in 1925, Ransom was invited by Vanderbilt to condemn the Fundamentalists to the southeast in Dayton. He refused-not because he sided with the anti-Darwinists but because he believed that the tyranny of science was threateningthe poetic foundation ofreligion (Quinlan 40, n. 3). Ransom's thunderless plight was virtually imagined by H.L. Mencken, one of the most stinging critics of the creationists, when in 1922 he penned a tongue-in-cheek lament forthe passing ofthe ancient deities. "Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king ofthe gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus," Mencken mock-elegized in "Memorial Service." "But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?" (95). God Without Thunder provides the answer to Mencken's archly lugubrious question: it is John Crowe Ransom. Grieving the demise ofthe deity ofyore, Ransom's treatise on the religious imagination heralds a one-man revival of Jupiter Tonans. Ransom believes that the god ofantiquity has been muffled bythe spirit of scientific abstraction that reigns notjust in Tennessee but across all of America.7 Hetraces this modern cult ofthe mind beyond the current efforts ofreligion to seek a rapprochement with biology and physics; beyond the science-driven Prometheus of Shelley, the rationalism of the Protestant Reformation, and the inquiry of Copernicus; beyond the errors of early Christianity, to a kind of primal sin. Humans have used their intelligence first to set themselves above nature, then to order the world according to their ways, and finally to exploit all ofcreation for their use. Demystified by science, thunder has become not the mighty weapon ofthe ancient God who tolerated no rivals but only the noise of heated and expanding air. Ransom views science as having such ultimacy that it exercises a mimetic function: it provides Girardian models for desire. "Science directs us to amuse ourselves, between desires," Ransom writes, "by simulating 7 Louis Rubin reads Ransom's "Armageddon" as a poetic companion piece to God Without Thunder, for it tells how divine wrath has been compromised amid the suavities of the modern world At the apocalyptic battle of the poem's title, a militant... (shrink)

Poreskoro, with three cat and four dog heads and a snake with a forked tongue as his tail, is responsible for epidemics of contagious diseases in Romany folklore. The Pishachas of Vedic mythology lurk in charnel houses and graveyards, waiting for humans to infect with madness. In Christian demonology, Pythius is known as the ruler of the eighth circle of the Inferno, bestowing heinous and unspeakable tortures on those who have committed fraud. Demons are the stuff of legends, and they (...) are everywhere in mythology and theology. These are just three of the more than thirty I counted that start with the letter P.How lucky we are for the advent of science. A rational tonic, it scatters our demons, demystifying the world for us—or so, at least, we think. As Canales brilliantly shows in this book, our assumption has been far off the mark. In physics, computer science, genetics, neuroscience, and economics, not to mention in the very foundations of rationality itself, an underworld of imaginary creatures has sustained and continues to inhabit modern science. Scientific demons appear in many guises: as atomic and subatomic particle manipulators, as feedback and parallel-processing experts, as messengers who can travel faster than the speed of light, as computer-code spies, gene and bit selectors in evolution and in informatics, as triggers of cascades from the nano level to the level of full-blown ecological and astrophysical theaters. By inventing them, we have learned that causality does not always hold at the level of atoms, that the speed of message transmission is limited, that living systems spend energy, that perpetual-motion machines are impossible, and that there are corners of the universe we have not imagined.We have all heard of Laplace's Demon, and Maxwell's, but who knew that, borrowing from physics, the historian Henry Adams considered the action of demons in geopolitics or that the economist Paul Samuelson analyzed their role in producing more efficient markets? Who knew that the generation that gave us the Internet and artificial intelligence were tasked by their teachers in graduate school to insert as many demons as possible into their programs? Who among us has heard of Darwin's Demon, or Maxwell-Szilárd-Brillouin's, or Monod's, or Loschmidt's? Who is aware of Norbert Weiner's use of demons in conceptualizing cybernetics, or of the great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem's comparison between Israel's superfast computers and the Golem?As Canales shows convincingly, it has been difficult for both historians and scientists to countenance demons in science, and so they have been written out, in many ways and many instances, of the histories of which they are part and parcel. Thomas Kuhn and even the more radical philosopher Paul Feyerabend both failed to acknowledge in their social critiques of science the extent to which an imaginary underworld of beings has been constitutive of the modern scientific imagination. Ironically, it was the man who provided a hard-and-fast criterion by which to distinguish scientific and nonscientific pursuits, Karl Popper, who ultimately saw the light. Revisiting his classic book The Logic of Scientific Discovery from 1934, he clarified in Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1982 the extent to which every historical era has been characterized by a particular demon. We moderns believe that science is about facts and numbers, but we are mistaken. As Canales beautifully summarizes the stakes of her project, “What first sets science on its path of discovery—then as now—is the continued use of the imagination.”Tracking the fate of demons in modern thought from Descartes to Lord Kelvin to H. G. Wells to David Bohm, and from Conrad Hal Waddington to Henry Compton to Stephen Hawking and Steven Pinker, Bedeviled assumes that the demons of the church or of paganism and the demons of science differ and resemble each other in ways that can be usefully elaborated. What is more crucial, however, is how such demons become real, how they morph from fears to hopes, and from thought experiments into real experiments, and ultimately to things in this world like computer programs, transistors, and nanorobots. From weather systems to messenger RNAs to black holes, demons emerge everywhere. The hard question is: How does the imagination actually drive discovery and understanding? How does it change our world?Perhaps it has been a sidetrack to consider whether we have or have never been modern. Clearly, what reason will not allow, it perennially recruits for a shadowland that helps us to better see our world. Rather than aiming to exorcise science, one day, of all of its methodological and epistemological ghosts, perhaps we might make peace with the notion that every culture struggles with distinguishing truth from falsehood in its own unique way. Such struggles are sensitive to their times and are accomplished through leaps of imagination. But fear not: the debunking of “Western rationality” casts no wet blanket on the project of Enlightenment. If anything, as Canales writes, “an account of science that considers how scientists themselves do science only risks adding new insights into our repertoire of knowledge.” Perhaps, therefore, there is solace to be gained from the dictum, Always choose the Devil you know. Ultimately, there may be no other way forward. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham catalogued a wide variety of uses for dead bodies in what was likely his last essay, ‘Auto-Icon’. Dead bodies could be preserved and transformed into statues and used, among other ways, as theatrical props, commemorative statues, and building materials. Auto-Iconism would eliminate the need for coffins and graveyards – as well as funeral rituals, clerics to preside over the funerals, and, arguably, the entire religious establishment. This essay offers a reading of ‘Auto-Icon’ as a bad joke: impolite, unrefined, (...) and in bad taste. The thought is that ‘Auto-Icon’ makes fun of the religious desire for immortality – continuing Bentham’s attacks on the religious establishment in this regard – as well as Bentham’s own pretensions to immortality, and of pretensions to good taste generally. As a bad joke, ‘Auto-Icon’ is an exercise both in the liberty of opinion and in the liberty of taste. (shrink)

The storytelling monkey why do we see faces in clouds? -- The creative serpent where did science come from? -- The pitiful monster why do doctors wear white coats? -- The logical alien why are we so unreasonable? -- The clever horse -- The science graveyard why do we hold onto bad ideas? -- The tangled web who is in control of what we know? -- The progressive human what will intelligence mean in the future?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Peace Tobin Siebers University ofMichigan To Perpetual Peace. Whether this satirical inscription on a certain Dutch shopkeeper's sign, on which a graveyard was painted, holds for men in general, or especially for heads ofstate who can never get enough of war, or perhaps only for the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, is not for us to decide. However, the author of this essay does set (...) out one condition.... The practical politician must not claim, in the event of a dispute with a theorist, to detect some danger to the nation in those views that the political theorist expresses openly and without ulterior motive.... By this clausula salvatoria, the author ofthis essay will regard himselfto be expressly protected in the best way possible from all malicious interpretation. (Immanuel Kant, Preface to Perpetual Peace) My goal is to work my way back to Kant's defensive preface to Perpetual Peace, the prophetic essay situated by many at the origin ofmodern conceptions ofpeace and international diplomacy. Suffice it to say for the moment that the following reflections are intended to reveal the epitaph in Kant's epigraph—the eternal repose residing in perpetual peace. Imagining relation One of the master ideas to come down to us from the eighteenth century holds that the imagination is central to all relations between self and other, however one might designate this otherness. The imagination is central to Adam Smith's idea of sympathy, and Kant uses it as a bridge to 86Tobin Siebers unify his critical philosophy. Whether referring to objects or other people, we require a faculty by which to extend understanding to them, and this faculty continues even today to be described as imaginative. Postmodern theorists, for example, conceive of human relations in terms of identity politics, but at the core of identification is the power to imagine, be it the power to sympathize or to conceive of a party different from oneself. In effect, then, relation is itself a function of the imagination. Moreover, no relation, I want to claim, exists for long that cannot be well imagined, for which some symbolic object or idea cannot be found. The four dominant modes of relation are religion, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.1 They deserve to be called modes insofar as they name different others to which the self (or another principal) may relate imaginatively. Religion is about the relation of goodness between subject and god called the sublime. Often nature, fate, or providence as personified forces or overarching systems are also called sublime. Aesthetics is about the relation of goodness between subject and object called beauty. Ethics is about the relation of goodness between subjects called character or virtue. Finally, politics is about the relation ofgoodness between communities called peace. Peace may seem at first glance to be an odd choice to name the relation of goodness in politics. A more obvious candidate might be the idea of utopia. But utopia comes into being as a concept only with Thomas More's treatise in 1516, and this late invention seems to exclude its being considered as the privileged good of politics. Moreover, the traditional opposition between ethics and politics exposes the unfitness ofutopia as a candidate for the political good. Ethics and politics are often at war because ethics does not want to sacrifice even one person to improve the relations among other people. Ethics strives for a wholly inclusive community, but it defines this community as a collection of autonomous individuals having value in themselves only as ends and never as means to an end. If ethics aims at a wholly inclusive community of individuals, then "utopia" may be described by rights as an ethical concept, regardless ofthe fact that Utopian desire seems to stress the wrong perspective on this community, coming as it does from the collective rather than the individual point of view. The ethical dimension of the Utopian is made obvious by the realization that a 1 I will not discuss cognition, although it is surely dominant, because its objects are various, whereas the modes ofrelation of interest to me here tend to represent their objects as being of a certain kind. Politics and Peace87 utopia... (shrink)

The journey to the cemetery is always solitary even when I am with people who are closest to me. In the graveyard, the we is dispersed and the I stripped bare." In Grave Matters, Taylor's ghosts become our own.

I am now halfway along the road of life; if we liken the human lifespan to a single day, it is now noon. Childhood is when we wake up from our slumbers and need some time to get over our morning lassitude, before we throw ourselves into our work; at midday, our energy is at its greatest, but we already feel tiredness looming; by dusk, we just want to finish off the day's work and get ready to sink into eternal (...) rest. If you look at it in this way, as I do, work is the most important thing in a person's life. But not everyone would agree with this view. I know that in China, country folk see having children as the most important thing in their lives. You bring up your children and then you die, leaving space for them—this is a very common way of thinking. But in the towns there is a different way of thinking, though I don't know if it is very common, and that sees winning social status as the most important thing in life. If you stand in front of the wall on Babaoshan in Beijing where the ashes of the dead are placed, you can gain some understanding of this attitude. On the grave of an old gentleman there I saw written, "Deputy Department Director, Deputy Branch Secretary, Associate Professor, Deputy Director of Such-and-Such a Teaching and Research Section, etc." It would of course be better for the old gentleman if the word "Deputy" could be removed from all of those, but that word is the best evidence for this way of thinking. And incidentally, in graveyards I have been to look at in the United States, I found that only two things were written on the gravestones: One was the dates of birth and death; the other was the dates of military service. This shows that they believe these two things are the only ones worth recording about a person's life: That this subject of God came into the mortal world, and that this citizen served his country loyally. To write anything else would be superfluous. I think this is a simpler and more unaffected way of thinking though probably it is overly distressing to write in a youth magazine about what I've seen written on graves, and I should get back to the main topic as soon as possible. (shrink)

Sheikh Halid Sufi, as a Sufi poet, addresses human being as the main subject of his sufist dicourse. He is an important figure of our recent history as he primarily adopted the goal of human perfection and revealed a doctrine of humanity in the school of knowledge. In advance of our current century, when human is seen just in physical respect, he lived as a man of heart who handled human being with an integrated approach within the aspects of matter (...) and spirituality, the world and the hereafter, individual and community, body and soul. In this communiqué, I will discuss Sheikh Halid Effendi’s ontology and his point of view on the place of human being in the realm of existence. He seeks human perfection and wishes people to free themselves of shabby desires and regain their disposition. He recommends people to achieve purity in order to reach the rank of being a mirror to God’s reflections. As a Sufi poet, he attaches importance to carrying out the education of divine journey, wrapping up in mystical ethics, having the identity of wisdom and gaining the aesthetics of love so as to reach the perfection. SUMMARY Sheikh Mehmed Halid was born in 1273/1856 in Sivas. He graduated from Ottoman Junior High School. He attended the 1893 War. In 1880, he started his professional career at a state office. Until 1899, he served in several positions, as assistant judge in Erbaa Lower Court, as Prosecuting Deputy Attorney in Sivas, as Prosecuting Judge assistant in Lower Court and head clerk in Darende, as head clerk in Lower Court in Tonus/Altınyayla, and as prosecuting judge in Kuruçay. He died in 1931 and was buried in Sivas Yukarı Tekke Graveyard. Sufism (tasawwuf) is an education for integrity towards maturity, in a way to prufiy the self from evils of nafs (self) and to reach the love of Allah. This spiritual educational journey is called ‘Seyr-u Suluk’. Sheikh Mehmed Halid completed his Seyr u Suluk as a dervish (student) of murshid (mentor) Kastamonulu Ganizade Mehmed Sadık Baba. Sheikh Mehmed Halid wrote three books called Hilafetnāme, Mektubāt, and Divan. He deals with issues of Sufism (mysticism) in these works. Primarily, his works dwells into the matters of morals, worship, good manners (adab), customary practices, ingenuity, existence, and love. Sheikh Mehmed Halid’s sole attempt is to explain the relationship among Allah, man and universe in an understandable way. According to Sheikh Mehmed Halid’s conception of Sufism, existence is unique and that existence is only Allah. The existence of Allah is absolute while the existence of assets is relative. Things do not exist on their own. Universe is like a mirror. What is reflected in the mirror of universe are the shadows of Allah the Omnipotent. The graces of The Divine are reflected in this mirror. All the things that exist in the universe proves the Self of Allah and his properties. Each of the things in the universe are the words of Allah. The existence of the universe is a result of Allah’s mercy. Man is the fruit of the tree of the Universe.Man is both the embodiment and the reflection of Allah. We want to discuss the position of man in between Allah and the universe with Sheikh Halid’s verses. Perceiving plurality in unity and unity in plurality, Sheikh Mehmed Halid attributes the variety of things and existence in the universe to the Divine beauties of Allah. For those who can comprehend, the plurality/ abundance in existing objects in the universe indicates singularity and uniqueness of Allah. According to Sheikh Halid, Allah is independent from and beyond all the entities that exist in the universe. However, Allah, manifests Himself in the things that he creates and the actions he takes through His divine names and properties. According to Sheikh Halid, each object is a reflection of Allah’s divine properties. Every entity in the universe glorifies Allah with all their existence. For Sheikh Halid, Seyr u Suluk is the journey from weakness to perfection, from substance to meaning, and from things to reality. Considering Seyr u Suluk education as distancing one’s self from other beings, reaching purity of heart, disposing of all signs explains these concepts with pilgrimage metaphor. As a response to those who asks him what he meant by seyr u suluk, he says seyr u suluk is servitude and submission to Allah. In order for Seyr u Suluk to be meaningful, a person should enter the way of a murshid-i kāmil (perfect religious mentor), and should have sincerity, purity (being deprived of all sins) and dhikr. According to Sheikh Halid, someone who is not in trouble is not given a remedy. So as to bother is necessary for remedy to be arisen. Nuisances of the universe are also ephemeral as the universe itself. Therefore, it is unnecessary to bother things that are ephemeral. Because remedy is not available without being mature. According to Sheikh Halid, the procedure of gaining advantage from being mature; getting rid of the ego, feeling the love, being pioneer of the mission, being modest, to attain soul pleasure, escaping from fame, leaving the claim, the glory of salvation, proceeding dhikr, reaching the conquests and escaping from friendship of worldly things. According to Sheikh Halid, being mature is not setting about affiliation ceremony. Asceticism cannot be a show and claim authority. Sincerity is needed on the basis of seyr u suluk education. Asceticism which is an effort of making the religion a specific of Allah is to make intimacy with Allah. Sheikh Halid wants his murids who take part in ṭarīqa (sufī path) to decide on the sincerity. Sincerity is said to be the unique factor that makes sense the membership. Seyr u suluk which begins with being membership of mature murshid, which makes sense with proceeding worship and respecting the sincerity arises by teaching manners to soul. Seyr u suluk is trying to reform the soul. Teaching manners to soul is a challenging and significant task. The most important factor that ensure teaching manners to the soul to be achieved is dhikr. Dhikr practice which makes successful the teaching manner to the soul of seyr u suluk training increases the prudence and foresight of dervish. The unique task that murshid expects from his murid during the membership process is to adjust his soul and parlance to the dhikr of Allah. Dhikr of Allah is a product of fondness. According to Sheikh Halid, one who wants to be remembered in heaven should himself learn to remember Allah. Sheikh Halid gives too much importance to disciplining the tariqa where sufi training takes place. A murid should qualify his murshid whom he intimated to. Followers should gain sufficient advantage from the spiritual atmosphere in the dergāh of their murshid. The murid must be at the service of the murshid who trains him and should obey tariqa manners. Salik who achieves seyr u suluk, who maturates the sufi ethics and who gains sincerity through dihkr of Allah tries to achieve the Gnosis. The intent of being a human is to know Allah. The biggest disaster for human is to come upon unawareness. Sheikh Halid who assumes the the Arifs as sultans of walayah makes a comparison between the Arifs and the Zahids and prefers the Arifs. He thinks that the Zahids pay attention to the appearance, cannot reach the basis and cannot go beyond Allahliness show. Sheikh Halid, who encourages the Zahids to avoid comparing themselves with the Arifs, warns the ones who combat with the Arifs and reminds that Allah proclaims warfare to those who has hostility towards those surrendering themselves to Allah. Sheikh Halid lines up the ways of being mature and having wisdom as godly grace, asceticism, love, the mind of leaving, battle with the self, humility, dikhr and being woeful. Salvation process which Marifetullah will guide is to achieve the love of Allah. Love is the way of achieving the reunion. The reality can just be gained through love. However, gaining the divine love requires to be loved. Because, the way of gaining the divine love is to remove everything except Allah from one’s heart. (shrink)

Discussions about the relationship between science and religion have never been absent from the public arena, but they seem to have made something of a comeback in the past decade or two. It is hard to say what accounts for such large-scale developments in society. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it has become increasingly clear that the secularization thesis, i.e., the claim that the modernization and rationalization of societies goes hand in hand with the gradual (...) disappearance of religion, must be put to rest at the graveyard of disconfirmed sociological predictions. Religion is here to stay, it now appears. Thoroughly secularized societies like those we find in Western Europe may be exceptional rather than exemplary. (shrink)

Back in 1922, American essayist H. L. Mencken wrote a little essay titled "Memorial Service". Here's how he began: Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance [power] was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli [wee-tsee-lohpoch'-tlee]? In (...) one year-- and it is no more than five hundred years ago--50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Mencken went on to name a total of 189 pagan gods.1 He told how millions worshipped them; how men laboured for generations to build them vast temples; how priests, evangelists, bishops, and archbishops served them; how to doubt them was to die, usually at the stake; how armies took to the fields to defend them against infidels; and how villages were burned, women and children slaughtered, and cattle driven off. All these, he pointed out in conclusion: were gods of the highest standing and dignity--gods of civilized peoples--worshipped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead. The death of the gods. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:398 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Becky Thompson In the Slip Between Coasts Every morning the sea announces the day intimate crashing against the high stone wall we scan the waves for black dots floating becoming new moons and then arms waving rafts carrying the world Cartography in Greece after Zeina Hashem Beck’s “To Hamra” Here is the Oleander bush where a family (...) hid before their walk up the hill from Eftalou to Molyvos after eating eggs and croissants in my seaside room thirteen pairs of shoes lined up on the patio slate Here is seaweed beach where one raft landed in perched sea another behind carrying the elders and children Becky Thompson 399 stalled, taking in saltwater coast guard delayed in Petra sea ten, twenty, fifty minutes shouting and prayer finally a rescue exhaustion lining every pore They say memories fade, mine multiply, a cacophony tossing Here is the beach where the Syrian man strapping muscles and whimsical eyes gave me his salmon shirt with a finely made collar his friends ordered selfies called home saying yes began the climb to Mytilini defiant, alive There were moments of freedom jubilation in the air rest on the beach with dates and cool water children tossing stones into the sea lovers sitting close, feet in Europe cell phones that worked, telegraphing safety What does it mean to miss the intimacy of disaster? Now rescue teams mechanic pick-ups intercept rafts before shore whisk people away to Skala Sikamia then Moria no time to touch sand rest with the breeze Here is life jacket graveyard next to the dump perched between two hills above the seacoast 400 Becky Thompson a German couple toots up on a scooter taking photographs while eating nine-grain toast academics from the US talking postmodern flight a film crew from Barcelona picking through jackets amid ashes and twisted plastic crows memorize the wind as two garbage trucks trudge up the road bringing old fish and more jackets I wave at the sheepherder as I walk down the hill Save the people, bury the dead, photograph the remains, repeat Here is the hotel by the beach in Petra where children would run to the iron swing set let the arc carry them then jump off dance in the sprinklers the owner emerging mumbling generations handing us apricots and bottles of water Here is the computer store where the young Greek tells me he can’t copy my poems since he sees Arabic words menacing the page Here is my patience as I sit in his smoke ask him about his family and dancing Becky Thompson 401 eye his automatic weapon perched next to a wooden door Down the highway is a new bar next to Moria. Of course. Here is barbed wire that doubles as a fence a clothesline for diapers space to toss out rotten food Here is the highway lined with pickups and two-door sedans young Greek employment guarding people in tents Here is a baby carriage a young mother pushes that seconds as a grocery cart and shade for her five-year-old a step up from before when babies were in arms toddlers walking Here is the refugee people center where they built a strong swing set men lifting weights growing rings around their arms women stretching out in a new room eyeing the Lesvos sky Here are the streets of Mytilini looking like Beirut the Greeks who ran from Turkey the Turks who kicked out Afghans the Afghans who wish they were Syrian 402 Becky Thompson Syrians joined by Congolese— teachers, holy seers, and men selling hats. The sidewalk sparkles an atlas in transit.... (shrink)

This paper describes developments in punishment theory since the middle of the twentieth century. After the mid–1960s, what Stanley I. Benn called “preventive theories of punishment”—whether strictly utilitarian or more loosely consequentialist like his—entered a long and steep decline, beginning with the virtual disappearance of reform theory in the 1970s. Crowding out preventive theories were various alternatives generally (but, as I shall argue, misleadingly) categorized as “retributive”. These alternatives include both old theories (such as the education theory) resurrected after many (...) decades in philosophy’s graveyard and some new ones (such as the fairness theory). Only in the last decade or so have new vares o “consequentialism” appeared to dilute a debate among philosophers that had become almost entirely about “retributivism”. I shall describe this trend in more detail. The description will be less an update of my 1990 survey than a rethinking of it. The conclusion I draw from this rethinking is that we need to drop the utilitarian–retributivist (and nonconsequentialist–nonconsequentialist) distinction in favor of one sorting punishment theories according to whether they rely in part on empirical considerations (externalist theories) or instead rely (almost) entirely on conceptual relations (internalist theories). (shrink)

Comme ses voisins, la Chine connaît depuis une quinzaine d'années une forte croissance des TIC. En même temps qu'elles ont favorisé la circulation de l'information et la liberté d'expression, elles ont contribué aux troubles de la personnalité chez les internautes chinois. On peut diviser ces derniers en introvertis et extravertis, correspondant éventuellement à la théorie lacanienne du stade du miroir. Dans un contexte où la tradition du collectivisme domine, les raisons de ce désordre sont analysées. Sans esprit de responsabilité ni (...) respect, les blogs sont remplis d'actes exhibitionnistes et de violence verbale, dépassant largement les limites habituelles des droits individuels. Le Web chinois est-il devenu le paradis de l'expression libre ou le cimetière de la démocratie?Like its neighbors, China has over the past fifteen years a strong ICT growth. At the same time they promoted the flow of information and freedom of expression, they have contributed to personality disorders among Chinese netizens. We can divide these into introverts and outgoing, corresponding possibly to the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage. In a context where the dominant tradition of collectivism, the reasons for this disorder are discussed. No sense of responsibility or respect, blogs are filled with exhibitionists and acts of verbal violence, far exceeding the usual limits of individual rights. The Web is China become a haven of free expression or the graveyard of democracy? (shrink)

Clues in the Gospels, evidence from Jewish historian Josephus, belief in the transmigration of souls, and well-documented examples of erroneous declarations of death, combine to support a natural explanation for the Easter story: Jesus survives his short stay on the cross, and is discovered to be barely alive by the few followers who retrieve him. Fearful because they have illegally retrieved a condemned man, they carry out a decoy burial in a tomb. Jesus expires soon after, and is buried quietly (...) in an anonymous grave, but rumor of his survival reaches his followers, as well as the Romans, who open the tomb and find it empty, except for burial linen used in the decoy. To sooth their grief the disciples seize on the rumor of Jesus’ survival and encourage each other to hear the voice and see the image of their master in others. Although the probability of the scenario proposed herein is low, it is surely far larger than the supernatural one. It also is arguably more likely than other non-supernatural hypotheses. It does not require Jesus to survive his crucifixion and meet his followers, or, if Jesus died, to have his body stolen, or be removed from the tomb after the Sabbath and reburied in a lower class graveyard. One only need propose that Jesus was still alive when taken down from the cross and envision how events most likely would unfold from there. (shrink)

Dervish lodges and cults were among the important elements of the Ottoman social life and in those times, they had spread to nearly all city centers, towns and villages. Dervish lodges served as non-formal educational institutions for people from all ages and all segments of the society. In addition to education, these structures also played important roles in political, economic, social and military life of the Ottoman Empire. In general, wise people and scholars contributed to the development and dissemination of (...) Islamic sciences in general, and specifically, mystic thought. As a matter of fact, it was determined that there were a great number of Dervish lodges that were founded or supported by shaykh al-Islam (the chief justice), kādī (judge), scholars and mudarrisīn (teachers) in the history of sufism. One of them was Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, which was founded in the 16th Century by Mehmed Vusuli Efendi, who belonged to the Ilmiya class (d. 998/1590). Until today no detailed studies have been conducted on lodges, which continued their existence until 1925. For this reason, this article will be the first study that deals with the dervish lodges in the light of archive sources. In this article, which was written to shed light on the course of our sufi cultural history, the prominent names, shaykhs and physical status of the Dervish lodges, especially Mehmed Vusuli Efendi, who was the founder of these lodges, will be dealt with.Summary: Our country, which hosts scientific moral centers like dervish lodges, school, madrasa and masjids, has a rich historical cultural treasure. As it is already known, the above-mentioned institutions had an important place in the life of Ottoman social life. Dervish lodges and madrassas were considered as science and wisdom centers because there is no distinction between zāhir (exterior) and bātin (interior) in our tradition. Under then-present conditions, the institutions that were needed most were supported. In this sense, the sultans and scholars cared about the dervish lodges, which were the places where sciences were studied contributing to the construction of these structures. One of these was Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, which was founded in the center of Eyupsultan by the Ottoman man of letter, poet and scholar, Mehmed Vusuli Efendi (d. 998/1590).Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge is located in the Debbaghane/Tabakhane (Tannery) district in the center of Eyupsultan. As Suleyman Çelebi stated, “the valiant ones worked in the Tannery”. For this reason, it is possible to say that there were tanners among the disciples and followers of Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge.Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge was built by Mehmed Vusuli Efendi, who belonged to the scholar class in the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed Vusuli Efendi, who served as a professor in various madrasahs, served as a kādī in cities like Konya, Kutahya and Istanbul. Mehmed Vusuli Efendi was called “Mullah” because of his madrasah origin and “Çelebi” because of being a member of the scholar class. For this reason, dervish lodge in question was known as Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge in his honor. Sources mention the religious, knowledgeable and modest personality of Mehmed Vusuli Efendi. In this sense, the establishment of a dervish lodge by someone from the scholar class is important in terms of being a sign of the togetherness of dervish lodges and madrasahs in the Ottoman Empire. In addition to his scientific personality, Mehmed Vusuli Efendi was also an important figure who wrote works both as prose and as poetry, and made some translations into Turkish. In addition to the Dervish Lodges mentioned here, Mehmed Vusuli Efendi also established mosques and public baths in various places in Istanbul and was interested in charity works. Cemaleddin Server Revnakoglu stated that he was given the nickname “FındıklıÇelebi” because he had established a mosque in Fındıklı District.Mehmed Vusuli Efendi was the son-in-law of Aise Hubbi Hatun (d. 997/1589), who was one of the lady poets of the 16th century divan literature. Aise Hubbi Hatun was the granddaughter of Kanuni Sultan Suleyman’s foster brother Yahya Efendi from Beşiktaş. Aise Hubbi Hatun was also the wife of Semsi Çelebi, who was one of the grandchildren of Aksemseddin. In this sense, Aise Hubbi Hatun was a person who served in the palace during the reign of Selim II. According to the sources, Mullah Çelebi was appointed to a post that was as high as being the kādī of Istanbul with the help of Aise Hubbi Hatun, who was one of the prominent figures of the palace. For this reason, Mehmed Vusuli Efendi was also known as “Hubba/Hubbi Mullah”.In the present study of ours on Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, one of the most prominent lady poets was Serife Zubeyde Fitnat Hanım (d. 1194/1780). In the sources, some authors discussed whether Fitnat Hanım’s tomb was in Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge. Since there is no inscription on it, the tomb of Mehmed Vusuli Efendi was assumed to belong to Fitnat Hanım. Actually, in the past, Istanbul Tombs and Museums Directorate hung a plate saying that the tomb in question belonged to Fitnat Hanim. However, Bilgin Turnalı revealed that the tomb of Fitnat Hanım was not in the Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge in his article with the title “The Tomb of the Poet Fitnat Hanım”.The archive sources, which we can examine on Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, generally belong to the 18th century and onwards. For this reason, the information on the establishment years of the Dervish Lodge was not determined fully. However, some of the archive sources reported some revenues of Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge. For example, it was recorded in the archives that payments were made to this Dervish Lodge in Muharramiya activities. As it is known, ceremonies were held in the Ottoman Palace in the month of Muharram, which was the initial month of the Hijri calendar, and a number of people and institutions in Istanbul and its surroundings were paid by the Sultan under the name of “Muharramiyya”.In Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, there were some prominent shaykhs like Mahmud Efendi and Nureddin Efendi. For example, since Mahmud Efendi had a lot of influence on the lodge, it was named after him for a period of time. Another prominent shaykh in the above-mentioned dervish lodge was Nureddin Efendi. As a matter of fact, he was closely interested in the maintenance and repair works of the dervish lodge and the activities related to the cults, and applied to Evkāf-i Humāyūn many times for repair works. Mehmed Esref Sabri Efendi, who was the shaykh before the last one in this dervish lodge, contributed to the training of many people of cult, especially Saadeddin Ceylan, who was the shaykh of Haki Baba Lodge. The last shaykh of Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge was Hafiz Hussein Kamil Efendi, who was the son-in-law of Mehmed Esref Sabri Efendi.When the physical condition of Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge is examined, it is understood that it was ruined in some periods in the history due to erosion; and for this reason, it had renovations. It was determined that Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, which belonged to the Kadiriyye cult, remained until the last period of the Ottoman Empire; however, after the closure of the dervish lodges in 1925, it disappeared rapidly. In our present day, two tombs that belong to Mehmed Vusuli Efendi and Aise Hubbi Hatun and a graveyard where the members of the lodge were buried are left behind from this Dervish Lodge. As it is known, Dervish Lodges had an important place in the religious, scientific, political and economic life of the Ottoman society. In this article, which was planned to examine the Ottoman sufi culture, the historical course of Mullah Çelebi Dervish Lodge, its founder, shaykhs, physical location, etc. were discussed in the light of the archive sources. (shrink)

Previous work proposes that dispositional fear exists predominantly among political conservatives, generating the appearance that fears align strictly along party lines. This view obscures evolutionary dynamics because fear evolved to protect against myriad threats, not merely those in the political realm. We suggest prior work in this area has been biased by selection on the dependent variable, resulting from an examination of exclusively politically oriented fears that privilege conservative values. Because the adaptation regulating fear should be based upon both universal (...) and ancestral-specific selection pressures combined with developmental and individual differences, the elicitation of it should prove variable across the ideological continuum dependent upon specific combinations of fear and value domains. In a sample of ~ 1,600 Australians assessed with a subset of the Fear Survey Schedule II, we find fears not infused with political content are differentially influential across the political spectrum. Specifically, those who are more fearful of sharp objects, graveyards, and urinating in public are more socially conservative and less supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of death are more supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of suffocating and swimming alone are more concerned about emissions controls and immigration, while those who are more fearful of thunderstorms are also more anti-immigration. Contrary to existing research, both liberals and conservatives are more fearful of different circumstances, and the role of dispositional fears are attitude-specific. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Materialism and Aesthetics: Paul de Man’s Aesthetic IdeologyJonathan Loesberg (bio)Declaring theories dead is an old and venerable method of declaring an end to our need to read them. As a result, theories die these days with dizzying frequency. It took most of the nineteenth century before Benedetto Croce declared what was dead in Hegel, and at least he intended to recuperate what he declared to be living. At the (...) 1996 MLA convention, in the space of only a couple of sessions, I heard both new historicism and cultural studies declared dead. Compared to Croce’s somewhat resigned attitude to Hegel’s mature demise, one must mourn the first theory, cut down suddenly in its vibrant adolescence, and the absolute infant mortality of the second. But surely the deadest of all dead theories is deconstruction. Indeed deconstruction must be dead, since its death has been declared with roughly the same frequency with which old vampire movies declare the death of the protagonist, who we know will nevertheless dependably arise for the next installment. Paul de Man, in particular, considering the regularity with which he is declared dead, threatens to become our most undead theorist. Certainly, he has published far more prolifically since his seeming demise in 1983 than he did prior to it. He made a prominent postmortem appearance when his World War II collaborationist writing emerged, and for a period, it became all but impossible to write about his later literary theoretical work without addressing these fifty-year-old newspaper articles. 1 By 1990, though, one could see de Man’s death reoccurring, though rather ambiguously. Thus in two articles written only a year apart in Diacritics, the same author first declared that de Man’s work was available “in near entirety” and that “substantial progress has been made in [its] interpretation” [Redfield, “Humanizing De Man” 35] and then later opened a second essay arguing that the theories had “not become any easier to assimilate” [Redfield, “De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception” 50]. And now, with the doubly posthumous appearance of Aesthetic Ideology, the assured certification of deconstruction’s death occurs again. 2 For instance, a review in the New York Times, warning off those readers who might be attracted to the book because of the “lurid glow 8cast by the opportunistic anti-Semitism of the wartime years,” declares not merely de Manian deconstruction but the aesthetic theories of Kant and Hegel to be without current [End Page 87] interest. 3 And Lingua Franca, in a piece reporting the end of Minnesota’s Theory and History of Literature series (Aesthetic Ideology and Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory mark the last books of the series), sums up this last work in the series and possibly the last work of de Man this way: “the book also reminds us—in its pristinely linguistic approach to ‘great’ literary and philosophical texts—that the moment of unadulterated deconstruction has long since passed.” 4 Astonishingly, Minnesota Press sent this death certificate to me as part of the publicity packet it sends to reviewers.Of course theories die differently. Since their extinction, putative or actual, is not human, we may declare their death joyously and without guilt, or work toward their revivification without messy transactions in graveyards. They die so readily and return without melodramatics because they lack a real biological limit to which we attach their significance. When we see their significance, we declare them alive. Either not seeing their significance or wishing they had none, we as easily sentence them to death. Whether or not de Man’s theories of reading or language are living or dead, to this process of declaring theoretical death and life, Aesthetic Ideology relates directly. In the first instance, it does so in its status as a published object. In a certain sense, it is, as we have seen, dead on arrival. Its central essays on Kant and Hegel—“Phenomenality and Materialism in Kant,” “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” and “Hegel on the Sublime”—have already been published and have received commentary as part of a larger coherent work on aesthetics that has long been announced. Even the previously unpublished essays—“Kant... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Of Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century ChinaR. Kent GuyOf Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century China. By Angela Zito. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xix + 311. Hardcover $45.00. Paper $17.95.It may be best to think of the argument of Angela Zito's enormously stimulating book Of Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in (...) Eighteenth Century [End Page 623] China as a series of concentric circles. At its core is a careful and satisfyingly annotated translation of the chapters of the Comprehensive Rites of the Qing (Da Qing tong li) (1756) that concern the grand sacrifice, the most important ceremonial moment in the life of a Qing emperor. From her careful and original analysis of these materials, Zito is able to bring new life not only to the Qianlong Emperor himself but also to the worlds of which he was, or sought to be, the center. These included the officials who served him, the community of scholars and editors who wrote about ritual, and the people who looked to the state for models of the centering process. In so doing, she rescues the eighteenth century from the accusation that it was the "graveyard of modernity." But she also examines the nature of Chinese ritual itself, in a way that explodes Western assumptions and explores Chinese subjectivities.There are far too many implications of this book to deal with in a short review, and any choice of themes is somewhat subjective. Zito's suggestion that we refer to the community of Chinese officials as an "imperium" rather than a "bureaucracy" (à la Weber) is a convincing one that will certainly influence our narrative practice. I was most impressed, however, with what I found to be the triumphant demonstration that this book achieves of the vitality of ritual in the eighteenth century. We have always known, at some level, that ritual was important in China, but we have not always known what to do with this fact. Like contemporary undergraduates who respond with blank stares when asked if they have ever participated in a ritual (I have tried this), we have stood mute before the mountain of Chinese primary source materials dealing with ritual. In showing us a way to read ritual texts, Zito reminds us that these provided for the Chinese a way of "making manifest" (p. 79) the power of heaven in human affairs, and re-actualizing past words in present ceremonial. In short, eighteenth-century students of ritual texts were hardly antiquarians; they were actually optimists, pursuing the possibility that the realities of the golden age of the past could actually be recovered in the present. And they were not only this, of course, for Zito offers the fascinating suggestion that in a world where literacy was becoming more common, the analysts of ritual were attempting to recuperate their social and political positions as "interpreters and creators of authority" by reconnecting writing and obscure ancient ritual practice.This comment, however, is really an aside in an argument that is mainly concerned with how ritual was acted out in the eighteenth century. The details of the Grand Sacrifice—the various prostrations, placements, and profferings—are compellingly described and interpreted here. One waits—to say "breathlessly" may be a bit strong, but certainly with mounting anticipation—to see what historical associations or symbolic statements will come next in this most theatrical of imperial performances. One of the most interesting questions is whether the emperor sacrificed as a filial son—human, like the officials who surrounded him on the lower steps of the altar, or like a sage whose access to the heavenly realm was of a qualitatively different character than that of any other mortal. Of course the emperor was both, and it was the function of ritual, as Zito argues, to negotiate the differences between the two. [End Page 624]What is at stake in this volume is nothing less than an attempt to recover the mentality of those who were engaged in ritual practices. What did it mean when the emperor clothed his body in ceremonial... (shrink)

The impulse to speculate about this phenomenon—the sudden eruption of dictionaries of philosophy in our own fin de siècle—is difficult to resist, particularly since a similar eruption of dictionaries is occurring in other intellectual disciplines as well. My own speculation is that we are witnessing the Owl of Minerva in full and somewhat frantic flight. As old hands in the trade know—but perhaps not many undergraduates, graduate students, or laymen—definitions in philosophy, unless they are purely stipulative, are almost never starting (...) points in inquiry; even more rarely are they stopping points. Normally, they are more in the nature of summaries pro tempore. In the normal course of things the motive for such quick backward-glancing summaries is a quite innocent desire, or need, for conceptual ballast and bearing before proceeding to the next intellectual task. But the flood of dictionaries and such-like reference books in the past couple of decades in philosophy, and in other disciplines, raises the suspicion—and not, I think, in my mind alone—that something more is going on. There is widespread malaise in the profession at present and some energetic treading of the waters on the sound principle, enunciated by Woody Allen, that “swimming is what you should do so you shouldn’t drown,” and nobody seems to know or have much of an idea of where we go from here. The volumes under review are part and parcel of this phenomenon. Honderich’s cheerful remark that “Philosophy... is not a dead or dying subject, but one whose vigour... is as great as ever it has been. It is only the sciences and the superstitious that come and go” seems suspiciously like whistling past the graveyard; it would not need remarking if it were true, or at any rate if it were not so dubious. (shrink)

This book reminds us in yet another context that women's contributions to science can be rendered invisible by “the historical record.” The Manhattan Project, the supersecret midcentury United States research, development, and production enterprise that produced the nuclear bomb, was a massive undertaking, at one time employing 130,000 persons. About 10 percent were women, yet official histories made no mention of female scientists or engineers.Sleuthing by the physicists Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg has documented Manhattan Project contributions by more than (...) three hundred women. Howes and Herzenberg begin with a few well‐known European women pioneers in nuclear science , none Americans and none available for the U.S. bomb effort. They then recount the history of the Manhattan Project via biographical vignettes of women, organized in chapters: “The Physicists,” “The Chemists,” “Mathematicians and Calculators,” “Biologists and Medical Scientists,” “The Technicians,” and “Other Women of the Manhattan Project.”It appears that few of these women knew each other. In her foreword, Ellen Weaver writes: “When I read the personal reminiscences of the men who were nuclear pioneers, I'm struck by the importance they place on their friends and associates, and on the often intense interaction among them, which could lead to major insights in both theory and practice of science. And I'm a bit jealous. By and large, women did not share in that give‐and‐take.”Not only was there little networking among women scientists and technicians in the early 1940s while the bomb was being developed, but there was little opportunity for them to share their experiences later. Only a very small percentage of these women were able to continue their professional careers. The many barriers to women as professional scientists and engineers, temporarily lowered owing to the manpower shortages of wartime, were raised after the war. There did not develop a community of women, engaged in teaching and research, with roots in the Manhattan Project.A web page is being developed to gather and provide further information about the women scientific workers of the Manhattan Project. Howes and Herzenberg are setting up an on‐line archive there, hoping that others who have information about the women scientific workers of the Manhattan Project will contact them via the web page or by email .The magnitude of their endeavor to learn about these women was illustrated vividly to me while writing this review. I attended the memorial service for my aunt, Mary Matilda Morrison Pendleton , and heard in her eulogy that “she worked as a nurse at the Hanford project, near Richland, Washington, where the government was secretly making atomic bombs. She would work shift work, two weeks of day shift, two weeks of swing shift, two weeks of graveyard shift, then she would get seven days off. She wore a badge every day that was checked after each day's work to see how much she had been radiated.” Although I thought that I knew her well, my aunt's role in the Manhattan Project had been unknown to me.The women of the Manhattan Project are finally gaining visibility. For example, Nancy Cook Steeper's book‐length biography of Dorothy Scarritt McKibbon is being published by the Los Alamos Historical Society. Howes and Herzenberg have provided ideas and starting points for many additional biographical projects. Perhaps the greatest long‐term value of their book is the impetus that it will give to further research.The book is well written, easy to read, and attractively printed. An appendix, listing the women and their roles, and a thorough index combine to make this an easily used reference work. There is also an informative sixteen‐page chronology that focuses on the crucial period from 1938 through 1945. (shrink)