Several quantitative studies (e.g. Kidd & Castano, 2013a; Djikic et al., 2013) have shown a positive correlation between literary reading and empathy. However, the literary nature of the stimuli used in these studies has not been defined at a more detailed, stylistic level. In order to explore the stylistic underpinnings of the hypothesized link between literariness and empathy, we conducted a qualitative experiment in which the degree of stylistic foregrounding was manipulated. Subjects (N = 37) read versions of Katherine Mansfield's (...) 'The Fly', a short story rich in foregrounding, while marking striking and evocative passages of their choosing. Afterwards, they were asked to select three markings and elaborate on their experiences in writing. One group read the original story, while the other read a 'non-literary' version, produced by an established author of suspense fiction for young adults, where stylistic foregrounding was reduced. We found that the non-literary version elicited significantly more (p < 0.05) explicitly empathic responses than the original story. This finding stands in contradiction to widely accepted assumptions in recent research, but can be assimilated in alternative models of literariness and affect in literary reading (e.g. Cupchik et al., 1998). We present an analysis of the data with a view to offering more than one interpretation of the observed effects of stylistic foregrounding. (shrink)

The present study investigated the extent to which moral disengagement and the tendency to consider moral rules as socio-conventional rules are distinct dimensions of morality, and their association with three different forms of participation in bullying. These two types of moral cognitions have been theorized in different models of morality and are usually studied independently, even if research on moral shifts suggests some possible overlaps. A group of 276 Italian students from primary and middle school completed self-reports assessing moral disengagement, (...) socio-conventional perception of moral rules, and participation in bullying as bully, defender of the victim and passive bystander. Results from structural equation modeling analysis confirmed that moral disengagement and socio-conventional comprehension of aggressions are separate and moderately connected morality dimensions. Controlling for age, gender and SES, only moral disengagement was positively associated with perpetrating bullying. These results point to moral disengagement as the critical component of moral cognitions to be addressed in interventions. (shrink)

Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.

In this fantastical, semi-autobiographical book, Vishwa Prakash addresses these questions.

A thought-provoking and timely call to apply Judaism's powerful teachings to help shift our imperiled planet onto a sustainable path. While appreciating the radical, transformative nature of Judaism, Richard Schwartz argues that it has been "stolen" by Jews who are in denial about climate change and other environmental threats and support politicians and policies that may be inconsistent with basic Jewish values. Tackling such diverse issues as climate change, world hunger, vegetarianism, poverty, terrorism, destruction of the environment, peace prospects in (...) Israel, and American foreign policy, he offers practical suggestions for getting Judaism back on track as a faith based on justice, peace, and compassion. He urges the reader to reconsider current issues in line with Judaism's highest values in an effort to meet the pressing challenges of today's world. (shrink)

Bioethics claimed to offer a set of generally applicable, universally accepted guidelines that would simplify complex situations. In Thieves of Virtue, Tom Koch argues that bioethics has failed to deliver on its promises.

The principal thesis in this book is that bioethics emerged—in the 1960s through the 1980s—under the influence of philosophers who claimed to have universally valid principles that could steer medicine and research to the solution of ethical problems, including even those arising at the bedside of patients. Tom Koch contends that these philosophers and their allied bioethicists “stole medicine” and its traditional values, substituting a philosophical discourse generally inaccessible to the average person. Philosophers thereby refashioned medical ethics in accordance with (...) their vision of a morally and intellectually robust new field. Koch maintains that philosophers have failed to deliver on their promises and that .. (shrink)

Reductionists about knowledge-wh hold that "s knows-wh" (e.g. "John knows who stole his car") is reducible to "there is a proposition p such that s knows that p, and p answers the indirect question of the wh-clause." Anti-reductionists hold that "s knows-wh" is reducible to "s knows that p, as the true answer to the indirect question of the wh-clause." I argue that both of these positions are defective. I then offer a new analysis of knowledge-wh as a special kind (...) of de re knowledge. (shrink)

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, and it is arguably more relevant than ever. In his preface to the 1992 edition of Shelley's classic work, Maurice Hindle notes that the novel, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, blends two mythical narratives, that of Prometheus as the Titan provocateur who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humankind for their survival, and that of Prometheus as a "plasticator, a figure who creates and manipulates men into life". Both story lines (...) are directly relevant to the modern practice of biological research, especially to embryology and to germ-line experimentation.Shelley conceived Frankenstein in Switzerland, having been... (shrink)

At times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for millenarian movements to arise to replace lost hopes by idle dreams: dreams of a savior who will lead us from bondage, or of the return of the great ships with their bounty, as in the cargo cults of South Sea islanders. Some may yearn for a lost golden age, or succumb to the blandishments of the new Messiahs who come to the fore at such moments. Those more (...) cognizant of the institutional causes of discontent may be attracted to an image of hope destroyed by dark and powerful forces that stole from us the leader who sought a better future. The temptation to seek solace, or salvation, is particularly strong when the means to become engaged in a constructive way in determining one's fate have largely dissolved and disappeared. (shrink)

In the late 1960s, a whole pantheon of thinkers regarding themselves as radicals stole a part of the anarchic praxis of late capitalism, turned it into philosophy, and with the resulting set of views turned against the foundations of the system in a purportedly radical gesture. Postmodernism was the name for the superficially revolutionary culture which then came into existence. The thought of the late left appears as the subsequent response to the cunning of the system.<BR> The main figures of (...) <I>Farewell to Postmodernism are Perry Anderson, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Zižek. The book provides an encyclopaedic introduction to their work, while at the same time seeking to grasp the current trajectory of radical thought. (shrink)

The kleptocratic supremacy of the praetorian prefect C. Fulvius Plautianus was felt throughout the city of Rome, the Empire and even beyond the imperial frontiers. Indeed, for the senatorial historian Dio Cassius, there was no more picturesque demonstration of Plautianus' acquisitiveness than his seizure of strange striped horse-like creatures from ‘islands in the Erythraean Sea’. The passage, as preserved in the text of Xiphilinus' Epitome, reads as follows : καὶ τέλος ἵππους Ἡλίῳ τιγροειδεῖς ἐκ τῶν ἐν τῇ Ἐρυθρᾷ θαλάσσῃ νήσων, (...) πέμψας ἑκατοντάρχους, ἐξέκλεψεν·In the end he even stole tiger-like horses to Helios from the islands in the Erythraean Sea, having sent some centurions to carry out the task. (shrink)

Ananda Metteyya (Charles Henry Allan Bennett 1872–1923), according to some representations of Buddhism's transmission to the West, was a respectable member of an elite group of converts to Buddhism at the beginning of the twentieth century, who, in effect, stole recognition from a non-elite group. Whilst not contesting this basic premise, I first suggest in this paper that Ananda Metteyya was neither elite nor always, at least in the eyes of the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland, ‘respectable’. In (...) fact, he came to pose a threat to the identity that the Society sought to create for itself. I then turn to three contexts within which Ananda Metteyya placed himself: international networks for the spread of Buddhism; anti-missionary networks within Sri Lanka and Burma; antiimperialist networks. His main vehicle within the first was the Buddhasāsana Samāgama, the international Buddhist organisation he founded in 1902 and the journal that accompanied it, which was sent to between 500 and 600 libraries throughout the world. Also significant was Ananda Metteyya's call for five men from four countries to come to Burma to be trained for higher ordination. Ananda Metteyya's anti-missionary agenda was realized through the promotion of Buddhist education in Burma and through a ruthless written critique of Christianity and Christian proselytisation. An anti-imperialist agenda was implicit within this and is extended in his writing. This paper argues, therefore, that Ananda Metteyya was a central figure in the global networking of a substantial number of those interested in Buddhism in the early years of the twentieth century. He was also an early Engaged Buddhist, a critic of the West and a robust promoter of the East. (shrink)

A friend of mine recently lent me a little book entitled What a Young Wife Ought to Know, by Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake, M.D., of Denver, Colorado. It was published in 1902 and is one of the Self and Sex series of “pure books on avoided subjects.” Its premise is that “Woman [is] fitted by the creator for wifehood and motherhood,” and it has chapters entitled “Home and Dress,” “Marital Relations,” “The Mother the Teacher,” and so on. My friend (...) had come across it in, of all places, the library of a mental hospital where his wife was being treated for postpartum depression. He stole it as a matter of principle. What a Young Wife Ought to Know has its late-medieval equivalent in a poem of around two hundred lines known as “What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter,” which has been used quite often by medieval historians as evidence for aspects of female behavior in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are problems with this, though, as a comparison with Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake's book shows. Historians of the early twentieth century would not, I assume, use What a Young Wife Ought to Know as evidence of social practice; rather, its interest is ideological. The same is true of “What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter”: it is a poem that speaks for the special interests that have shaped its form and content. (shrink)

In 1936, in a chapter of Language, Truth and Logic clearly influenced by Hume and influenced also by Ogden's and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning, Ayer claimed that judgments of value, in so far as they are not scientific statements, are not in the literal sense significant but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false. To say ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’ is not to state any more than one would have stated by (...) merely saying ‘you stole that money’. To add that the action was wrong is not to make a further statement about it, but simply to evince one's moral disapproval. ‘It is as if I had said “you stole that money” in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation mark. The tone or the exclamation mark adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings of the speaker’. (shrink)

In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history. His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being suggest powerful new ways to understand the meaning of kinship, beyond the abstractions of Western liberalism. How does this analysis of race and kinship translate into the context of the Transatlantic slave trade, which not only (...) stole Africans from their families and communities, but also imposed upon them a single “fictive” kinship relation to the master? What if the problem of racialization is not only a matter of being “chained” to one’s identity through (presumed) blood ties, but also being violently separated from one’s kin? What does it mean for the concepts of ethical and political fraternity if the only father recognized by law and society as legitimate is the slave master? Or if the bodies of slave women are exploited, not only for productive labor, but also for the reproductive labor that makes more slaves for the master? If kinship is a way of making sense of the relation between past, present and future generations, then what does a radical disruption of existing kinship relations, and the imposition of one fictive, absolute and unilateral kinship relation, do to the social meaning of time and of history in a particular community? In this paper, I reflect on the significance of fecundity and kinship in the context of US slavery, both in order in order to situate my analysis in the particular history of my own present community, and as a way of demonstrating the significance of a more determinate social analysis for Levinas’ ethics of singularity and politics of universal justice. (shrink)

The conversion of the Nubian Kingdoms, by the missions sent from Constantinople in the sixth century, was followed by Byzantine influence on Nubian art. One of the most obvious examples of this process was representing archangels dressed in loroi. This paper aims to present the evolution of loroi in Nubian art. In Byzantium, they were ceremonial stoles worn on special occasions by the emperors or the highest dignitaries. The archangels were also clad in loroi, acting as high officials at the (...) celestial court. Interestingly, loroi were adopted only for the images of archangels in Nubia, not for the images of Nubian kings. At the end of the 10th century, the lower end of the loroi was expanded to a broader segment resembling the Byzantine thorakion, typical of female images. This could have added splendor to their garments, but could it have also highlighted the vague gender of the archangels? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews and essays, (...) Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

Two pillars of medieval English literature, Chaucer and Malory, stand accused by posterity as criminals, yet scholars remain perplexed about the nature of their crimes over five centuries later. Some convict them of the heinous offense of sexually assaulting a woman against her will, while others believe them guilty of no more than seduction or consensual sex. The allegation against Malory has even been reframed to portray him as a knight in shining armor rescuing a damsel in distress; thus instead (...) of seizing a woman in order to rape her, this author of Arthurian legends “stole” Joan Smith away from her abusive husband when Joan departed with Malory consensually. Keen to illuminate the personal lives of the authors whose Canterbury Tales, Morte Darthur, and other works opened up the world of the Middle Ages for posterity, contemporary researchers have seized upon medieval English legal sources to clarify these authors' own stories. The crime in which Chaucer and Malory have been implicated, of seizing a woman, confounds those historians and literary scholars seeking to explore these authors' late-medieval milieu because the word most frequently employed to record the misdeed is one of the most ambiguous legal terms in medieval England, and indeed Europe. When an individual seized a woman or stood accused of her seizure , the term's multivalent connotations mean that the offense might conform to either or both of our modern legal categories of rape and abduction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Buddha through Christian EyesElizabeth J. HarrisIt was in Sri Lanka in 1984 that I had my first ‘encounter’ with the Buddha. When at the ancient city of Anuradhapura, I stole away from the group I was with to return for a few minutes to the shrine room adjacent to the sacred bo tree, the one believed to have grown from a cutting of the original tree under which (...) the Buddha gained enlightenment. Devotees dressed in white were sitting or prostrating silently. I joined them and looked toward the image, which showed the Buddha sitting in meditation against a painted scene of pale blue sky, white clouds, and mountains. Suddenly the image became more than mere plaster. All I can say is that it communicated. It beckoned. Against the blue of the sky, the serene head became suffused with cosmic significance. I know that there was unfinished business between me and the Buddha.The moment was prophetic. Two years later, I returned to Sri Lanka to study Buddhism and stayed over seven years. ‘Study’ is not quite the right word because, together with the academic, I also sought to immerse myself in Buddhism with the wish to see it through the eyes of Buddhists. I practiced meditation under Buddhist teachers, participated in temple devotion, and joined pilgrimages. It was a process that meant temporarily letting go of much that was dear to me as a Christian. But the rewards were inestimable. Never again has the image at Anuradhapura ‘spoken’ to me. In fact, on return visits it has appeared artistically poor, certainly no match for the older stone images, open to the air, in other parts of the city. But then, around and inside that very shrine room in May 1985, Tamil guerrillas gunned down 146 innocent devotees, rupturing centuries of devotion with pools of blood.My seven and a half years in Sri Lanka make it almost impossible for me to write about the Buddha as a complete outsider. I remain a Christian, but the Buddha has become part of me. An exquisitely carved wooden image of the Buddha in meditation is now part of my home. The peace that emanates from it gives me strength. In complete honesty, I can say that I revere the Buddha.But what Buddha do I revere? Do I revere the Buddha in the same way as Buddhists? To reflect on how my appreciation of the Buddha may be different from that [End Page 101] of Buddhists is not easy, for Buddhism contains within itself so many faces of the Buddha. There is the historical Buddha of the earlier parts of the Pali canon, the Buddha of the later hagiographic biographies, the Buddha of popular devotion, Mahayana Buddhism’s vision of multiple Buddhas and cosmic buddhahood, the Buddha of what has been termed Protestant Buddhism. Yet I sense that there is a common thread within all of these faces—namely, the Lord Buddha as the supreme embodiment of compassion and wisdom, the one who has seen into the nature of reality and the human predicament and has taught the path of liberation.All that I know of Buddhism tells me that the person of the Buddha is central. The devotion shown to the image is more than would be given to a human teacher and more than would be given to a god. Acchariya manussa is one phrase used in the Pali texts—“wonderful man.” He is human, yet more than human in that he was enlightened and worked toward this enlightenment without outside aid through countless lives of self-sacrifice and virtue. This I believe all Buddhists would agree to, and such a being is supremely worthy of reverence.How does my appreciation tally with this? It is the Theravada tradition that has nurtured my own understanding, and it has done so in three ways. First, there has been my reading of the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali canon. In the first two years of my time in Sri Lanka, I read through most of the nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka, albeit in translation, and I found myself encountering again and again a teacher I could respect and revere. “How... (shrink)

The popular expedient of identifying noncognitivism with the claim that moral judgments are neither true nor false leaves open the question of what kind of thing a moral judgment is—an indeterminacy that has led to decades of confusion as to what the noncognitivist is more precisely committed to. Sometimes noncognitivism is presented as a claim about mental states (“Moral judgments are not beliefs”), sometimes as a claim about meaning (“X is morally good” means no more than “X: hurray!”), sometimes as (...) a claim about speech acts (“Moral judgments are not assertions”). Focus on the last two possibilities. The former calls for a translation schema from a propositional surface grammar to a non-propositional deep structure. Such schemata from the noncognitivist are familiar to students of metaethics. (Cf. A.J. Ayer’s claim that in saying “You acted wrongly in stealing that money” one is “not saying anything more than … ‘You stole that money,’ [but] in a peculiar tone of horror.”) It is less widely realized that the noncognitivist is not obliged to offer any such translation schema, for she might instead plump for the last option, of formulating noncognitivism as a theory not of meaning but of use. Perhaps the moral cognitivist is correct about the meaning of moral sentences (there is a wide range of possibilities here) but wrong about the way people use moral sentences: perhaps people do not assert moral sentences, perhaps the nature of acceptance of a moral claim is not belief. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the Haller Zeitung; it will probably not appear at all--it has, among other short, comings, the fault to be too long." In a letter to Schtitz, Niethammer writes from Bamberg on 23 March 1807: "I repeat my urgent demand... to send the review of Salat's book submitted by Prof. Hegel as soon as possible to Jena to hand it in to Hofrat Voigt.... " (...) The volume contains almost 1,000 valuable notes which explain the philosophical and historical background of the newly edited material. HENRY WALTERBRANN Takoma Park, Maryland Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev: Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Trans. with Intro. by Mary-Barbara Zeldin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969. Pp. 203. $7.50) Mary-Barbara Zeldin's translation into English of the Philosophical Letters and the Apology of a Madman, by the enigmatic Russian intellectual leader of the early nineteenth century, Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev makes available in English for the first time the thought of this figure whose small corpus of writings circulated mostly in manuscript during his own lifetime and waited over a hundred years after his death for their complete translation in their original French. Historically Chaadayev is important as a mediator between Westernizers and Slavophiles in this initial period of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual awakening. Chaadayev himself remained aloof from either of these parties, was appealed to by both of them and became himself a kind of martyr to intellectual freedom. His own view of Russian-Western relationships incorporates this problem most remarkably into a theological vision of the "education of the human race." Philosophically Chaadayev stands as a unique and somewhat eccentric synthesizer of German idealism with the Christian concept of salvation history. Perhaps the most remarkable insight to be gained by reading these long-buried essays is the ease with which an Eastern Orthodox Christian versed in Patristic hellenism could fuse the ideas of a paedagogy of the human race in Lessing, Herder and Schiller and read this as an expression of an Irenaean doctrine of the progressive development of a mankind through the mediation of the primordial Logos; an Alexandrian idea of the paedagogy of Christ in history and a Eusebian doctrine of Christian universal empire. In so doing this Russian thinker also reveals to what an extent the German idealist movement itself was grounded on much older syntheses of Christian thought. In the process, however, Chaadayev also shows that nineteenth-century men could only appropriate this heritage anew by taking the great credal themes of revelation, Christi, the church and the Kingdom of God and reissuing them in a secularized, humanistic dress, as a philosophy of history. Chaadayev's basic thesis is that knowledge is a divinely-given deposit of certain fundamental primordial ideas, which man would not have arrived at through his own unaided powers, but rather possesses as an imprint upon the mind of the first man implanted by the Creator. Chaadayev weds the western philosophical concept of a fundamental a priori with a doctrine of primordial revelation, revealing the foundation of man himself in the divine Logos. This primordial deposit of ideas existed in BOOK REVIEWS 495 the first man only as a rudimentary 'image' of God. It is only through historical development that man grows to full stature in these truths whereby he attains to the completed 'likeness' of God. These truths, together with their historical development, are passed down by a historical succession, which is not an ecclesiastical succession, but a succession of the human family. These truths are periodically renewed by the advent of certain extraordinary individuals who exemplify them to a high degree, and by certain elect nations who are divinely designated as their culture-bearers. The Jews of the Old Testament were that culture-bearer in antiquity, and, since the time of Jesus Christ, it is Christendom which stands for and bears the development of this primordial truth as it has been renewed and set forth in archetypal perfection by Christ. Chaadayev sharply down grades the role of the Greeks in this development, but does so in a manner remarkably similar to the ancient Christian apologists who stole Greek fire in order to bathe the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trungpa's Barbarians and Merton's Titan:Resuming a Dialogue on Spiritual EgotismSteven R. ShippeeA Dialogue Begun: The Meeting of Chögyam Trungpa and Thomas MertonMuch of the dialogue on the spiritual life between Buddhists and Christians has centered on two locations in the United States. The first is Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado. This institution was founded in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan master and lineage holder of both (...) the Nyingma and Kagyü traditions, two of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Under Trungpa's guidance, Naropa hosted an important series of Buddhist-Christian contemplative dialogues in the 1980s.1 A second significant place is Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery that became home to Thomas Merton in 1941. Since 1996, and through the efforts of several of the same people who had worked on the Naropa dialogues, the abbey has hosted three interreligious "encounters" sponsored by the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.2An important link between these dialogues, as well as the initial inspiration for the first of them,3 is the meeting of the two men most famously associated with each of the hosting institutions, Trungpa and Merton. As many of their respective readers know, the two men met in Calcutta on 19 October 1968, and spent several days together.4 This contact was very stimulating to them both and seemed the beginning of a deep friendship. Merton was so impressed with Trungpa that he immediately determined to visit Trungpa's new monastery in Scotland. Trungpa later said, "Meeting Thomas Merton was wonderful,"5 and that he felt he "was meeting an old friend, a genuine friend."6 Despite the brevity of their relationship, during his last talk on 10 December, Merton said he likewise considered Trungpa "a good friend."7 Later that same day, their friendship and dialogue were terminated by Merton's death. Not two months had passed since the meeting in Calcutta. Trungpa called Merton's death "a tremendous loss, to me personally and to the world of genuine spirituality."8Judith Simmer-Brown has provided the fullest picture thus far of the relationship between Trungpa and Merton.9 One of the facts that most intrigues Trungpa's [End Page 109] followers is his own recollection, shared with participants at the third Naropa dialogue, that the two discussed what he called "spiritual materialism" (his most common phrase for spirituality co-opted by ego) at some length over dinner and drinks.10 This article picks up where that recollection leaves off. While we do not know more about the specific content of that discussion, we do have a body of writings from each man on topics relating to the quest and pitfalls of authentic spirituality. A comparative analysis of these proves worthwhile, as further elucidation of what made possible their meeting of the minds and the immediate affection they felt for each other, and certainly as wisdom that still has the power to deepen our spiritual experience today by exposing the manipulations and deceptions to which ego11 subjects even our noblest spiritual aspirations.The challenges to authentic spiritual life were major concerns for both Trungpa and Merton, a leitmotif that characterized almost all of their respective teachings and written works.12 As an extensive examination of these is not possible here, I have set side by side one symbol from each: Trungpa's modification of the traditional Tibetan teachings on the Lalos (kla.klo, literally "barbarians"), which he translated as the "Three Lords of Materialism," and Merton's reflections on the tragic Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. These two symbols, while certainly not exhaustive of their insights, nonetheless effectively crystallize their respective thoughts on the matter, and thereby allow us to see that Trungpa and Merton shared very striking insights both about the malady of spiritual egotism and about its necessary antidotes.Chögyam Trungpa on Spiritual MaterialismIn talks given from 1970 to 1973, Trungpa gave teachings to his students on "the Three Lords of Materialism," symbolic personifications of the trap to which he referred as spiritual materialism.13 Believing that most of his students were sincere about the spiritual path, he... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Quest for the Historical Abstract ExpressionismDaniel A. SiedellAbstract Expressionism:The International Context, by Joan Marter and David Anfam. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 320 pp. $26.95, paper.Abstract Expressionism, by Debra Bricker Balken. London: Tate, 2005, 80 pp. $9.60, paper.Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, by Ellen Landau. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 768 pp. $45.00, paper.What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is (...) that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if successful, it does the others.—Harold Rosenberg, 1952From the moment of its inception in the 1940s, "Abstract Expressionism" has been the subject of reframings, redefinitions, and revisions. This is because it is more than the sum total of artworks and artists traditionally recognized as part of the movement. It is a constitutive part of postwar American cultural life, and it has shaped how we understand art and the role of the artist. It has also shaped the practice of art criticism and defined the role of the art critic. Because it is part of the United States' creation myth of a distinctive postwar "American identity," it also possesses significant symbolic value. And this symbolic value is why it has been such a popular subject for art museum exhibitions for nearly half a century. The fact that in the last ten to fifteen years, major art museums have mounted major exhibitions of the work of key figures in the movement, like Jackson Pollock (including a feature film starring Ed Harris), Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, and that auction prices for these artists reach tens of millions of dollars, suggest that, no matter how contested and complicated the concept of "Abstract Expressionism" is, the artists associated with the movement remain relevant.1Abstract Expressionism is not merely big business for museums, collectors, and auction houses. It has also been big business for scholars. The symbolic power of Abstract Expressionism and its influence on shaping and [End Page 107] forming contemporary artistic and critical practice has made the movement an important subject for historical and critical scrutiny. The publication of Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting in 1970 was the first book-length study on Abstract Expressionism, and it marked the gradual beginning of the movement's transformation from a living entity to a more reified subject palatable for academic inquiry. Blending Alfred H. Barr's formalism with an historian's interest in subject matter and iconography and a critic's access to the artists, The Triumph of American Painting provided a taxonomy of sources and influences. Sandler's book, in part, provoked the publication of Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art in 1983 (written in 1978 as a doctoral dissertation), which initiated nearly fifteen years of serious and provocative scholarship on Abstract Expressionism. Guilbaut's radical revisionist approach to the subject—which sought to reinterpret the entire development of Abstract Expressionism as an aesthetic weapon of the Cold War—provoked a slew of responses from art historians eager to either jump on the careening bandwagon of Marxist social histories of modern art or hunker down in the trenches to protect hard-won scholarly turf. The latter was the response of a loose federation of art historians eager to forge a scholarly orthodoxy. This emergent paradigm is revealed in a 1988 special issue of Art Journal called "Abstract Expressionism: New and Improved," coedited by Stephen Polcari and Ann Gibson. This issue included essays by those art historians who understood themselves as part of a "new generation" of scholars characterized by their collective desire to transcend the polemics and limitations of those critics and curators whose distorted picture of the movement would be restored to clarity through scholarly distance, a distance that a "new synthesis" of Abstract Expressionist "art, culture, history, and society together, not separately" would produce.2 Sandler and Guilbaut were swiftly dismissed by these art historians of the "new and improved," the former because of his formalism and close proximity to the artists—many of whom he knew personally—the latter because of his Marxism... (shrink)

Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers's target inWho Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Womenis “gender feminism.” Her aim is to convince us that gender feminists are anti-intellectual opportunists who deliberately spread lies about the incidence of date rape (chap. 10), domestic battery (Preface, chap. 9) and about the general state of male-female relations in America (chaps. 1, 9 and 11), thereby generating fear and resentment of men (chap. 2), all so that they may secure vast amounts of government funding and high-paying (...) jobs in the academy (chaps. 4, 5 and 6). Because gender feminists are condescending to and contemptuous of the “average woman,” they lack a grass-roots constituency (p. 22). Nonetheless, they are powerful enough to be feared. Gender feminists have managed to dupe the U.S. Congress (chap. 8), and an otherwise sceptical press literally eats out of their hands (p. 15). Gender feminism is also a leading cause of the weakening of the American university (p. 52), and has “made the American campus a less happy place” (p. 112). (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron This is a poorly organized book, and it does not really present any well- structured arguments. In a blurb on the back of the book, Christopher Eisgruber says that “every serious scholar of religious toleration will have to contend with Leiter’s bold claims.” That would have been so if Leiter had proceeded less precipitously to the question that interests him and then focused on it more steadily— if, for example, he had first identified the classic arguments for toleration (...) and criticized them and had then gone on to argue that neither the classic tolerationist arguments ðsuch as they areÞ nor any other principled arguments can make a case for religious accommodations. That would have been a bold and bracing argument. But poor structure and lack of clarity with definitions make it harder to see what is at stake in any of the arguments and what position exactly Leiter is counseling us to take. Christopher McCammon There’s been enough renewed interest in republicanism over the past thirty years that we can call it a “republican revival.” If you know about this revival, it’s probably through the Quentin Skinner cum Philip Pettit excavation of a third way between Isaiah Berlin’s conceptions of negative and positive freedom. For republicans, Skinner and Pettit tell us, freedom is ðor at least requiresÞ nondomination. Living without domination requires neither the absence of interference nor the actualization of ideals associated with positive liberty—autonomy, self-mastery, and so on. Suppose I want to drink less, but I just can’t sober up. So I hand over my liquor cabinet’s key to a friend, on the understanding that she will only return it after a day’s notice. This is one of Pettit’s favorite examples. He thinks it shows how interference doesn’t always compromise freedom. If I beg you for the immediate return of my key, and you refuse as per my instructions, you interfere with me, but you don’t reduce my freedom because you interfere on my terms. Interference makes me less free only when it isn’t on my terms—such interference is “arbitrary”as republicans often say. Arbitrary interference always reduces freedom. Suppose you stole the key in hopes of helping me overcome alcoholism. Your actions might lead to increased self-mastery, but you left me worse off in a freedom-specific way nonetheless. Pettit thinks that a robust commitment to democracy falls right out of this conception of freedom. The republican tradition rejects outright William Paley’s claim that life under “the edicts of a despotic prince” might be “no less free than the purest democracy” ðThe Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002], 314Þ. Why? Because however religiously they leave us alone, despotic princes hold a power of arbitrary interference. The promise of democracy, from a republican perspective like Pettit’s, is that a democratic regime is one where the state interferes only as bidden by the people. He claims that there is thus a deep, maybe even conceptual, connection between republicanism and democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the Haller Zeitung; it will probably not appear at all--it has, among other short, comings, the fault to be too long." In a letter to Schtitz, Niethammer writes from Bamberg on 23 March 1807: "I repeat my urgent demand... to send the review of Salat's book submitted by Prof. Hegel as soon as possible to Jena to hand it in to Hofrat Voigt.... " (...) The volume contains almost 1,000 valuable notes which explain the philosophical and historical background of the newly edited material. HENRY WALTERBRANN Takoma Park, Maryland Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev: Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Trans. with Intro. by Mary-Barbara Zeldin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969. Pp. 203. $7.50) Mary-Barbara Zeldin's translation into English of the Philosophical Letters and the Apology of a Madman, by the enigmatic Russian intellectual leader of the early nineteenth century, Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev makes available in English for the first time the thought of this figure whose small corpus of writings circulated mostly in manuscript during his own lifetime and waited over a hundred years after his death for their complete translation in their original French. Historically Chaadayev is important as a mediator between Westernizers and Slavophiles in this initial period of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual awakening. Chaadayev himself remained aloof from either of these parties, was appealed to by both of them and became himself a kind of martyr to intellectual freedom. His own view of Russian-Western relationships incorporates this problem most remarkably into a theological vision of the "education of the human race." Philosophically Chaadayev stands as a unique and somewhat eccentric synthesizer of German idealism with the Christian concept of salvation history. Perhaps the most remarkable insight to be gained by reading these long-buried essays is the ease with which an Eastern Orthodox Christian versed in Patristic hellenism could fuse the ideas of a paedagogy of the human race in Lessing, Herder and Schiller and read this as an expression of an Irenaean doctrine of the progressive development of a mankind through the mediation of the primordial Logos; an Alexandrian idea of the paedagogy of Christ in history and a Eusebian doctrine of Christian universal empire. In so doing this Russian thinker also reveals to what an extent the German idealist movement itself was grounded on much older syntheses of Christian thought. In the process, however, Chaadayev also shows that nineteenth-century men could only appropriate this heritage anew by taking the great credal themes of revelation, Christi, the church and the Kingdom of God and reissuing them in a secularized, humanistic dress, as a philosophy of history. Chaadayev's basic thesis is that knowledge is a divinely-given deposit of certain fundamental primordial ideas, which man would not have arrived at through his own unaided powers, but rather possesses as an imprint upon the mind of the first man implanted by the Creator. Chaadayev weds the western philosophical concept of a fundamental a priori with a doctrine of primordial revelation, revealing the foundation of man himself in the divine Logos. This primordial deposit of ideas existed in BOOK REVIEWS 495 the first man only as a rudimentary 'image' of God. It is only through historical development that man grows to full stature in these truths whereby he attains to the completed 'likeness' of God. These truths, together with their historical development, are passed down by a historical succession, which is not an ecclesiastical succession, but a succession of the human family. These truths are periodically renewed by the advent of certain extraordinary individuals who exemplify them to a high degree, and by certain elect nations who are divinely designated as their culture-bearers. The Jews of the Old Testament were that culture-bearer in antiquity, and, since the time of Jesus Christ, it is Christendom which stands for and bears the development of this primordial truth as it has been renewed and set forth in archetypal perfection by Christ. Chaadayev sharply down grades the role of the Greeks in this development, but does so in a manner remarkably similar to the ancient Christian apologists who stole Greek fire in order to bathe the... (shrink)

Introduction The EDWs perspective, a new general framework of thinking for all physicists! “The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.” Richard Feynman In other works (2002, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016; Vacariu and Vacariu 2010, 2016a, 2016b), we have showed that the greatest illusion of human knowledge is the notion of “world”, of “uni-verse”, or as we called it, the “Unicorn-world”, and this notion has survived from (...) the oldest times until today. In these works, we have indicated that the “world”, the “Universe” does not exist, but the “Epistemologically Different Worlds” (EDWs) exist (more specifically, for many EDWs, it is about the entities and the interactions which really exist and only represent these EDWs). We emphasize that the EDWs perspective is a new Copernican revolution in human thinking, the greatest movement in Physics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Philosophy! During the past 15 years, we have applied the EDW paradigm to the main particular sciences and main theories in physics (quantum mechanics, Einstein’s special and general relativity, and the relationship between them), cognitive science (to the main theories like computationalism, connectionism, and the dynamical system approach), cognitive neuroscience, and biology (just to the relationship between life and organism/cell). Also, we showed that the entire Philosophy since Ancient period until now is totally wrong (just because, all philosophical approaches have been constructed within the “Unicorn-world”). This book closes the circle of great topics concerning the main particular sciences (physics, cognitive (neuro)science, and biology) and philosophy grasped in all our previous books (2008-2016): it is about the relationship between the main theories and concepts of Physics vs. the EDWs perspective! The main theories that we investigate in this and our previous works have been created within the Unicorn-world, therefore, all these approaches have been quite wrong. Some of these theories have been partially re-write in our previous books (Einstein both relativities, thermodynamics, and our EDWs perspective, see Vacariu and Vacariu 2016, 2017, etc.), but even some notions of these theories were wrong. For instance, in our previous book (2016), we indicated that “spacetime” cannot even exist (spacetime cannot have any kind of ontology!). Therefore, in 2017, re-wrote Einstein’s both relativities without “spacetime”. The majority of theories in Physics have been created within the unicorn world and therefore these theories have been quite wrong or at least the authors of these scientific theories have been used wrong concepts. This book is a collections of our previous ideas, but we strongly emphasize that some of these idea are quite developed in this work. Therefore, this book can be labeled as: “a philosopher overwriting Physics within a new paradigm, the ‘Epistemologically Different World’ (EDWs) perspective”! We emphasize that some parts of this book are from our previous works (but even so, these parts are modified, we added new paragraphs or sub-chapters), but some parts are new written. In general, the new details of this book are the results of following Presura’s book about Physics (2014) written in Romanian. His book is a general overview of the main theories in Physics. Presura is a physicist who wrote a book about these theories in a quite easy language for large public (also for philosophers). There are quite many paragraphs from Presura’s book that are quoted in our book. We emphasize that Presura’s paragraphs inserted in our book are our translations. Also, we inserted quite many of his ideas but we mentioned his name each time. We apologize if some notions or ideas are wrong translated. The first Chapter is about the EDWs perspective. In Chapter 2, we introduce more details about the rejection of “spacetime”. In Chapter 3, we insert the ideas from our book Vacariu and Vacariu 2017 about Einstein’s relativity without “spacetime”. However, new paragraphs are introduced in this chapter. In Chapter 4, we are indicating that all alternatives of quantum mechanics have been wrong: parts of this chapter are from our previous works, other parts and paragraphs are new ideas/comments. In Chapter 5, we discuss about the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and the Theory of Everything (TOE), Big Bang (transformed, according to the EDWs perspective, in many Big Bangs – in this way, we avoid Alan Guth’s empty notion of “inflation” which contradict Einstein’s principle of constant speed of light which cannot be surpassed by anything else). In Chapter 6, we introduce an updated version about the dark matter and the dark energy (in 2016, we published a book about “dark matter/energy, space and time and other pseudo-notions in Cosmology” and in 2020 we published a chapter in a book edited by the physicist Michael Smith - see the bibliography. We mention that, in that book, except our chapter, all the other chapters are written by physicists!). For instance, in section 6.4, we introduce a new alternative to dark energy and dark matter, an alternative that is different even from this updated approach! In Chapter 7, we furnish more details about the non-existence of “hyperspace” and the futility of the “superstring theory”. In Chapter 8 in indicate the clear great distinction between our EDWs and Primas and Atmanspascher’s approach (under Spinoza’s “dual aspects” approach and Bohr’s “complementarity” constructed within the unicorn world). In the last chapter, chapter 9, we analysis Rovelli’s rejection of “spacetime” (based on Einstein’s general relativity) within the unicorn world. We rejected the ontology of “spacetime”, but our argument is totally different than Rovelli’s argument. Moreover, we indicate that Rovelli’s argument is quite wrong, constructed within the unicorn world. As a conclusion, we emphasize that we have overwritten the main theories, ideas and concepts of Physics within the new Copernican framework of thinking, the EDWs perspective. The umbrella under which we have been working indicates that the great problems of Physics are pseudo-problems constructed within the wrong framework, the “Unicorn world” (the Universe/world) which does not really exist. Therefore, we have to replace the unicorn world with the EDWs! At the end of our Introduction, we mention that that have been many physicists, cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers who have published UNBELIEVABLE similar ideas to our ideas long time after our ideas being published!).[ Discovering the EDWs, Gabriel Vacariu HAS CHANGED EVERYTHING in human knowledge! His EDWs is the greatest CHALLENGE in the history of human thinking. Many people have published UNBELIEVABLE similar ideas to our ideas long time after we published and posted our first works on Internet. About the UNBELIEVABLE SIMILARITIES here: academia researchgate philpapers All our main ideas (the mind-brain problem, main problems of cognitive science and quantum mechanics, Einstein’s relativity vs. quantum mechanics, etc.) from my Springer’s book (2016) can be found in my PhD thesis (2007), UNSW (Sydney, Australia, posted on university’s website, free, by the university’s team in 2007) unsworks.unsw.... Nobody discovered the EDWs during 2500 years, Gabriel Vacariu discovered them in 2002 (first publication), 2003 and 2005. Amazing, in the last years, many people also “discovered” the existence of EDWs! Statistically, it is quite impossible, so many people (hundreds!) to “discover” the EDWs! (Don’t forget, we have been working within the Internet’s world, therefore, communication is much faster than 20 years ago...) “I don't care that they stole my idea. I care that they don't have any of their own… The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.” (Nikolai Tesla) What these authors have been missing comparing with Gabriel Vacariu? They have been either physicists or cognitive neuroscientists or philosophers while Gabriel Vacariu is a philosopher working Cognitive Neuroscience and Physics! This is the main reason they have been unable to discover the EDWs and to think and write the “Metaphysics of EDWs” (our book 2019)!] It is not something surprising since the EDWs has changed everything in human knowledge! Therefore, we end this chapter with this paragraph: “The distance between the pioneers and the much smaller followers becomes so great that the latter cannot reach the former; the age of servile imitation begins – yet not of nature, but of the style of the great masters, zealous copyists remove the labels from the elixirs of the Magi and put them on their vials.” (Arnold Gehlen, Images of time). (shrink)