Pendant la Grande Guerre, les millions de lettres échangées entre les soldats mobilisés et leurs conjointes permettent d’observer les rapports conjugaux qui se recomposent, se nouent ou se dénouent alors. Elles constituent des sources précieuses pour étudier la place des émotions dans la fabrication de nouvelles relations à distance. Cet article interroge le genre des émotions déployées dans les relations conjugales à distance, et suit trois objectifs : questionner la façon dont s’expriment et se décrivent, en commun ou différemment, les (...) émotions masculines et féminines ; mesurer de quelle façon le conflit, épreuve sentimentale pour les couples séparés, trouble l’expression des émotions ou les réinvente ; comprendre enfin de quelle façon les émotions – exprimées ou tues dans l’interaction épistolaire – jouent un rôle dans le ré-assignement des rôles sexués imposés dès le début du conflit. (shrink)

The personal writings of First World War nurses and VADs (volunteers) provide the historian with a range of insights into the war and women's nursing roles within it. This paper offers a number of methodological perspectives on these writings. In particular, it emphasises two elements of engagement with texts that can act as important influences on subsequent historical writings: authorial intention and scholarly interpretation. In considering the interplay of these two elements, the paper emphasises the motivations both of (...) those who produced primary sources and of those who later used them to ‘serve’ particular historical interpretations. The paper examines letters, diaries and semi‐fictional writings, considering the influences of gender, class and professional background on the ways in which their authors wrote. It then briefly considers the uses to which historians have put these original writings. The paper offers insights into the ways in which complex personal writings can be interpreted and concludes that the writings of First World War nurses and volunteers offer a rich and varied set of perspectives on both the war itself and the nature of wartime nursing work. (shrink)

'ground-breaking anthology... wide array of perspectives on WW1, from both sides of the fighting' -B. Adler, Choice 'a very fine anthology' -Times Literary SupplementThe First World War inspired a huge outpouring of writing that, until recently, was thought to be almost the exclusive preserve of men. Yet the war also acted as a catalyst which enabled women writers to find a literary and political voice. This anthology bears witness to the great variety and scope of women's writing about (...) the war. Covering the years 1914-1930, the book brings together little-known writing from across the world, drawing on a wide spectrum of genres from letters and diary entries to essays, novels, and short stories. Among the celebrated writers featured in this anthology are: Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Pankhurst, Maud Gonne, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, Olive Schreiner, Colette, Vera Brittain, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, HD, and Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

An exceptional collection of letters, postcards, original writings, and photographs The First World War witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of philosophers and their families: as soldiers at the front; as public figures on the home front; as nurses in field hospitals; as mothers and wives; as sons and fathers. In Germany, the war irrupted in the midst of the rapid growth of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological movement – widely considered one of the most significant philosophical movements in twentieth century thought. (...) Philosophers at the Frontoffers a documentary history of phenomenology in the First World War. Through an exceptional collection of primary source materials (letters, postcards, original writings, photographs) from the Husserl Archives in Leuven, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Archives of the University of Göttingen, the complex narratives of how the war affected the lives and thought of central figures in the phenomenological movement are charted. Key figures such as Edmund Husserl, his sons Wolfgang and Gerhart, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Adolf Reinach, Martin Heidegger, and others are included in this collection of materials. The volume includes reproductions of original material, as well as German transcription of all texts and their English translation. (shrink)

The roles of small and great books, and passionate yet well-considered writings in the general education of a “college” or “university” trained teacher are questions which should be turned back upon the historian as teacher and writer. Where resides the historian's classroom? Who are the students and how do teachers come to be? What subject matter should be used to prod and provoke an often dormant humanity awake? Professor Marc Bloch's work, his passion for history's rôles and its voices from (...) the past speaking to the present, had a Renaissance in the cauldron of World War II. Bloch's commitment to teaching and writing history, teaching about the forceful, or surprising and shocking, “presences” of history's supposed past-tense experiences, remains seminal to the historian's craft. Bloch's own voice from the past was forged in an intensity of present-time experience. Reflection was searing experience. Memory was “now” and remembrance was an accident of preservation for futures then unknown. These futures need to know of the experiences of former, fragile, personal and generational memories if the very same futures were to be lived more surely and securely. Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, remains a vindication of the human-centred, purposive roles of history in a general education. Moreover, this general education can now be said to cover the broad sweep of “secondary schooling” experiences. This sweep of schooling and post-schooling experiences is beginning, however tentatively and problematically, to extend itself into worlds of work, the futures of work and the academic futures or courses of higher education: the arena of tertiary and university education. In a not dissimilar fashion but in an even more intense spirit, Bloch's work, L’étrange défaite, examines the explosion and implosion of France and, in effect, Western Europe in the years, months and days leading up to the German offensive in the West of 10 May 1940. Bloch recognized that education and the failures to harness intellect, true intellectual freedom and innovative teaching weighed heavily upon the disastrous course of events in 1940. Professor Bloch's texts can serve two complementary purposes. First, his works, Strange Defeat and The Historian's Craft remain as significant, contemporary records of personal thoughts, argumentative methodologies, and recollections of world-shattering events. They constitute, quite literally, an historian's craft in action. Second, Bloch's texts can serve an equally valuable role where the writer seeks to take his reader through and beyond the immediate historical question, methodology or series of unravelling events into an intellectual duel which stands upon the historian's engagement with worlds, past and present. Questions and actions, makings and doings matter in this world. Understanding is not only a prime responsibility of the historian; it is a duty which might well prove dangerous. Given the above observations, this essay will seek to emphasize that world history and the teaching of broad histories of humanity recognizes few, if any, borders which seek to block or hold at bay the presentation of the “passport” known as understanding. Teaching history is much more than teaching civics or recognizing civilizational variety and its barbarous opposites. Teaching history is an act, however imperfect, of recognizing ourselves in time. My brother “schoolmasters”—when it came to the point, you did, for the most part, put up a magnificent fight. It was your goodwill which managed to create in many a sleepy secondary school, in many universities—prisoners of the worse routines the only form of education of which, perhaps, we can feel genuinely proud. I only hope that a day will come, and come soon, a day of glory and of happiness for France, when, liberated from the enemy, and freer than ever in our intellectual life, we may meet again for the mutual discussion of ideas. And when that happens, do you not think that, having learned from an experience so dearly purchased, you will find much to alter in the things you were teaching only a few years back? Strange Defeat, 142).1 What was at stake was a geological upheaval of thought …2. (shrink)

I write as a non-Jew about the brief correspondence sent to my father, shortly after the Second World War, from a gifted, young Jewish violinist, and briefly outline the background story-arc of her family’s aliyah, from the Pale a couple of generations earlier to her settlement in the new state of Israel. Her story is not bound up with the Holocaust, nor did she experience antisemitism: but this essay attempts to highlight the majesty and sparkle of a moment in (...) the mundane life of a Jewish woman, and its brief impact on a gentile. The focus is on her musical remarks about some of the leading performers of the day. I also outline some of the ways I secured source materials for this primarily biographical sketch, but this article is presented more as a ‘memoire’ than an academic study. It is offered in honour and memory of a Jewish lady whom, alas, I was a little too late to meet myself, and to celebrate my father’s hundredth birthday in May 2021. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, the most famous English thinker of the post-war era, and the focus of growing interest and discussion. Above all, he is one of the best modern exponents of the disappearing art of letter-writing. 'Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends,' wrote Berlin to a correspondent. This first volume inaugurates a long awaited edition of his letters that might well adopt (...) this remark as an epigraph. Berlin's life was well worth living, both for himself and for the world. Fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. Berlin's letters reveal the significant growth and development of his personality and career over the two decades covered within them. Starting with his days as an eighteen year old student at St. Paul's School in London, they cover his years at Oxford as scholar and professor and the authorship of his famous biography of Karl Marx. The letters progress to his World War II stay in the U.S. and finally, his trip to the Soviet Union in 1945-6 and return to Oxford in 1946. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2601\REVIEWS.261 : 2006-06-05 11:55
eviews AN EPISTOLARY BIOGRAPHY S A Theology and Religious Studies / U. of Lund   Lund, Sweden @. Nicholas Griffin, ed., assisted by Alison Roberts Miculan. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. Vol. : The Public Years, –. London and New York: Routledge, . Pp. xix, . Prices in : £. (pb £.); . (pb .). ith the publication of (...) the second volume of The Selected Letters of WBertrand Russell, Nicholas Griffin has completed a work of impressive scholarship. The first volume came out in  and contains  letters, the second  letters. The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University hold between thirty and forty thousand of Russell’s letters. Griffin does not claim to have looked through all of them, but apart from our editor he has probably read more of them than any other person. This provided him a unique perspective on Russell of which he has made the best. The letters have been intertwined with extensive commentaries and supplied with informative footnotes amounting to approximately  pages in the first volume and  pages in the second. Together with the prefaces and the introductions, they supply us with an epistolary biography of Russell that covers most aspects of his life. There are some differences between the first and the second volume due to the availability of letters. In the first volume there are many letters to Russell’s first wife, Alys, and his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Griffin writes in the preface to the second volume that these touched on almost everything that was important to Russell, which made it unnecessary to look for letters elsewhere. The letters to Ottoline continued their pace until , but he kept on writing to her until she died in . Griffin relies heavily on these letters up to her premature death. When Colette O’Niel came into the picture in , she took over Ottoline’s role, but Russell’s letters to her are not quite as revealing as those to Ottoline. The Russell Archives have close to , letters to Ottoline and   Reviewed by Katharine Tait in Russell, n.s.  (): –. russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (summer ): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  - _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2601\REVIEWS.261 : 2006-06-05 11:55  Reviews to Colette, and they contain much information for anyone interested in Russell. For the second volume Griffin has therefore been forced to search further afield for letters. At the same time there are many more letters to choose from. Another complicating factor has been the variety of Russell’s interests after . Before the First World War Russell had mainly devoted his energy to logic and the foundations of mathematics. When the war broke out, he channelled his energy into anti-war work. After the war his interests grew in many directions, as did the number of correspondents. Towards the end of his life he returned to political activism; still, his correspondence in the s covers a wider range of topics than at any other time. Given the variety of Russell’s interests, Griffin had to decide which interests should be included. This must have been a difficult task, but Griffin argues convincingly for why he has excluded letters directly related to Russell’s involvement in world government organizations, letters concerning the Indo-Pakistani border dispute and technical letters about philosophy. He has also excluded— although not totally—letters concerning religion, people he had known earlier, events he had been involved in and opinions he had held. Some topics had to be excluded due to the lack of suitable letters. In spite of all these restrictions, Griffin has been able to produce a most interesting, if not complete, epistolary biography. The book is divided into six chapters: () War (–),  letters; () Children, Companionship, and Joint Work (–),  letters; () Starting a School and Ending a Marriage (–),  letters; () Marriage, Poverty, and Exile (–),  letters; () Respectability at Last (–),  letters; () Peace (–),  letters. The titles and the periods are aptly chosen and give a good hint about the major projects in which Russell was involved. As can be deduced from the number of letters given for each chapter, Griffin devotes most attention to... (shrink)

In this article I discuss the prosthetic phenomenon during the First World War and Weimar Germany. As opposed to contemporary trends, with their inflationary use of the ‘prosthesis’, sometimes even hypothesizing ‘prostheticization’ as a paradigm, I seek to return the debate about the prosthesis to its historical concreteness. I describe the phenomenology of the prosthesis in three senses: first, in the statistical sense, in the form of a dramatic growth in the number of prostheses; second, in the (...) visual sense, in the form of a dramatic growth in the visibility of the prosthesis. Basing myself on the Heideggerian perception of the ‘phenomenon’, I seek to reveal an additional, third, aspect of the phenomenology of the prosthesis. It is my contention, against the background of the major catastrophe of the First World War and the frequent crises that afflicted Weimar Germany, but also in the light of additional contexts — technological, economic, cultural — that the prosthesis was increasingly perceived as a phenomenon, i.e. as something which appeared in a wide range of ways — as prosthesis, as tool (hammer, writing instrument), as an organic limb (hand, leg), and even as a paradigm (man as ‘prosthetic God’, man as ‘Dasein’). (shrink)

It is widely believed that John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace to protest the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War. The central thesis of this paper is that Britain’s war debt problem, not German reparations, led Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. His main goal at the Paris Peace Conference was to restore Britain’s economic hegemony by solving the war debt problem he helped to create. We show that (...) Keynes was responsible for many of the most notorious aspects of the reparations section of the Treaty, and he crafted his proposals in light of mercantilist theories designed to keep Germany relatively poor after the war. His desperate desire to solve Britain’s war debt problem, mixed with his mercantilist ideas, inspired him to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. (shrink)

Abstract This essay examines Gramsci?s writings about the First World War, primarily his immediate reflections in 1914?1918, but also relevant prison notes (1926?1937). The most striking feature of his attitude during the war years is ?Germanophilia?, a label I adapt from Croce, whose writings on the Great War also exhibited this attitude. A key common motivation was that political conflicts should not be turned into religious ones in which one portrays the enemy as an evil to be annihilated. (...) But they also had other divergent motivations. Another striking feature of Gramsci?s writings during the war years was his opposition to economic measures against Germany. He seemed to suggest that a military conflict should not be automatically expanded to include an economic war, conflating politics and economics. But later in prison he theorised that modern wars tend to be wars of position, in which military operations and industrial production are vitally connected. (shrink)

The First World War was both an historical and a philosophical event. Philosophers engaged in what Kurt Flasch aptly called "the spiritual mobilization" of philosophy. Max Scheler was particularly important among these "war philosophers", given that he was the one who penned some of the most influential philosophical writings of the First World War, among them Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg. As I aim to show, Max Scheler's war writings were crucial for Jan (...) Patočka's interpretation of the First World War in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. However, the importance of Scheler's war writings goes far beyond the First World War for Patočka, since they offer Patočka a far-reaching interpretation of the 'excessive' character of the 20 th century. As I will show through the example of Max Scheler, the German war philosophers succumbed to a dangerously romantic conception of "force" – and it is this ominous force, which Patočka takes to lie at the root of the increasingly excessive character of the 20 th and 21 st centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Life and Writings of Edmond Pezet (1923–2008)Pierre Gillet and Jonathan A. SeitzIn the context of Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Thailand, the life and writings of Fr. Edmond Pezet (1923–2008) are remarkable. He lived among the poor and in a Buddhist monastery, and he also experienced the eremitic life in the forest. According to the Indian Zen master Ama Samy, “Pezet gained an intimate experience and knowledge of Buddhism by (...) living with Thai monks.” Here I introduce a recent Society of the Auxiliaries of the Mission (SAM)1 work that offers a biography and some writings of Edmond Pezet, Edmond Pezet, a Priest among Buddhist Monks in Thailand.2This publication is a collection of various writings of Edmond Pezet: correspondence and nine articles published in various magazines in French, Thai, and English. It has been edited by Henri Huysegoms, a Zen practitioner in Japan for the last forty-five years, and Pierre Liesse, an activist who worked for a couple of years in Thailand. These authors have been impressed by two characteristics of Pezet. First, because he was born in a very poor family in rural France, Pezet identified himself with poor people working hard to earn their living. Second, he was a very committed scholar who successfully learned to speak English, Thai, Lao, Sanskrit, and Pali.Edmond Pezet did his military service in Vietnam, where he was the helpless wit was the helpless witness of torture committed by his regiment fellows on Vietminh suspects. This led him to return there in the future as a missionary, to compensate for the harm he saw caused to the Vietnamese people. Back in France, he completed his study of theology. In 1947, his father was crushed by a truck in front of his eyes. He managed to combine his study and work on the land to provide for his family’s needs. He served as a priest in the diocese of Cahors (France) for a few years. Afterwards, he joined SAM in Belgium.At the end of 1956, he was sent in the northeastern part of Thailand. Faithful to the objectives of SAM, he wanted to serve the local bishop unconditionally, but he quickly noticed a painful reality. Christians and clergy alike followed “a religion, with a dreamlike heaven, rose-water-scented, as its goal, and, in order to get there without fail, certain ‘tricks,’ recipes, ceremonies and representations accompanied by a goodly number of rags and trimmings, where one cannot very easily see the connection between the two things.”3 He wrote that he was stunned to see the way religion was taught to catechumens. They were asked to assimilate, by memorizing [End Page 195] questions and answers, dogmatic assertions expressed with words borrowed from Sanskrit that nobody understood. This inadequate education went hand in hand with a lack of knowledge of Buddhism, sometimes accompanied by scorn. “The Christians were deliberately uprooted from the spiritual richness and religious experience of their race … especially the clergy! (kept apart from their people from the age of 10 to 27). They were taught to administer on the model of the French parish priest of last century.”4His Thai bishop, to whom he opened his heart, did not see any problem in that situation and advised him to get used to it, but for Pezet it soon became unbearable. In 1970, Pezet’s life took a decisive turn. He went to Bangkok. There, he learned Sanskrit and Buddhism at the university level, and for three years lived in the house of a Buddhist monk, helping him to write introductions to Buddhism for foreigners. It made him discover a world of spiritual wealth he had not suspected.What he learned was not a new doctrine presented as absolute truth, because Buddhism does not present its core teaching that way, but a “doctrine” that is expressed exclusively in existential values, something not to be taught, but experienced. Buddhism, he discovered, does not deal with transcendence, because it does not engage in speculative discussion. In Buddhism, this transcendence can only be perceived in the depth of immanence.In a letter of that time, he noted that his bishop had warned him not... (shrink)

The European emigration on the other side of the Atlantic was a complex phenomenon. The areas inhabited by Romanians got acquainted to this phenomenon towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Therefore, starting with the year 1895, a certain mixture of causes led to a massive migration to America, especially of the Romanians from the rural areas. The purpose of our study is to explore the causes of the Romanian emigration across the ocean up (...) to the First World War to present the Romanian emigrants' features (occupation, age, gender, social status, religious affiliation, the way they were distributed across the North-American territory) and to bring forth essential aspects of the way they embraced the assimilation process. From a methodological standpoint our analyses are based upon official data of the US Census. This data is being interpreted in the light of some reference papers referring to the period that makes the object of our study. A certain amount of information presented here relies on our research activity in the Metropolitan Archives of Sibiu, where the ecclesiastic correspondence of that time provides very interesting data.  . (shrink)

This searching critique of the United Methodist Bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear age, by America's foremost Christian ethicist, exposes theological flaws from which flow gaps in moral argument and strangely utopian politics. Never before has In Defense of Creation been more thoroughly analyzed. At the same time Paul Ramsey gives a full-length and detailed comparison of the Methodist document with The Challenge of Peace by the U.S. Catholic Bishops. Issues of nuclear ethics, as seen (...) by the leaders of two major churches, are set fully in view for the first time in a single volume. This "ecumenical consultation" is broadened by drawing extensively on the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The book's larger purpose is to construe an encounter between Christian just-war tradition and Christian pacifism. This comparative discussion of Christian ethics should be of interest to any reader concerned about the nuclear crisis. Some of the questions confronted in these pages are: What do people mean by "nonviolence"? Should we never kill another human being, or never kill another human being unjustly? Do Christian pacifism and Christian just-war teachings have anything in common in their understanding of the Christian moral life? Do different interpretations of the person and work of Jesus Christ give rise to Christian pacifism and to just-war participation? Are these irreducibly different options equally valid for followers of Christ? Do the tests of discrimination and proportion lead to the same prohibitions on war and limits in war in a nuclear age? With an epilogue by Stanley Hauerwas, this volume offers the unusual event of two Methodist laymen engaged in lively debate over their church and the modern world. (shrink)

This searching critique of the United Methodist Bishops’ pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear age, by America’s foremost Christian ethicist, exposes theological flaws from which flow gaps in moral argument and strangely utopian politics. Never before has _In Defense of Creation _been more thoroughly analyzed. At the same time Paul Ramsey gives a full-length and detailed comparison of the Methodist document with _The Challenge of Peace_ by the U.S. Catholic Bishops. Issues of nuclear ethics, as seen (...) by the leaders of two major churches, are set fully in view for the first time in a single volume. This “ecumenical consultation” is broadened by drawing extensively on the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The book’s larger purpose is to construe an encounter between Christian just-war tradition and Christian pacifism. This comparative discussion of Christian ethics should be of interest to any reader concerned about the nuclear crisis. Some of the questions confronted in these pages are: What do people mean by “nonviolence”? Should we never kill another human being, or never kill another human being _unjustly_? Do Christian pacifism and Christian just-war teachings have anything in common in their understanding of the Christian moral life? Do different interpretations of the person and work of Jesus Christ give rise to Christian pacifism and to just-war participation? Are these irreducibly different options equally valid for followers of Christ? Do the tests of discrimination and proportion lead to the same prohibitions on war and limits in war in a nuclear age? With an epilogue by Stanley Hauerwas, this volume offers the unusual event of two Methodist laymen engaged in lively debate over their church and the modern world. (shrink)

Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most remarkable women of her day. From early childhood she experienced religious visions, and at the age of eight she entered a cloistered religious life in the Benedictine monastery of Disibondenberg. Eventually she not only became abbess of the community, but presided over the establishment of an important new convent near Bingen. All but forgotten for hundreds of years, Hildegard was rediscovered in the 1980s and since then her visionary writings have been widely (...) read and studied. Even more surprisingly, music that she composed has been performed and recorded to great acclaim. She has come to be seen by some as a proto-feminist icon -- a woman of great accomplishments who made her own way in a man's world and exerted extraordinary influence over some of the most powerful figures of her time. Much of Hildegard's correspondence has been preserved. It reveals that for more than 30 years this cloistered nun was an unflinching adviser and correspondent to all levels of church and society, from popes and kings to ordinary lay persons, from Jerusalem to England. With the 2004 OUP publication of Volume III of Joseph Baird and Radd Ehrman's translation, the complete correspondence became available for the first time in English. For this new abridgement, Baird has selected 75 of the most interesting and revealing of the letters from Volumes I, II, and III. Freed from the organizational restraints of the Latin edition of the letters, he has arranged them in roughly chronological order and provided greatly expanded, accessibly written introductory notes that contextualize the letters and explain their significance. As a result, this fascinating collection serves as a kind of life in letters that makes an ideal introduction ot this exceptional woman, her world, and her work. This book is the first to give a thorough and definitive illlumination of the personal life of Hildegard of Bingen as viewed through the defining lens of her personal correspondence: her early, hesitant bid for recognition of her spiritual gifts; her courageous, and ultimately futile, fight to retain the companionship of her close personal friend and the poignant outcome of that struggle; her vehement defiance of the male hierarchy in her bid to establish her own communities under her personal governance; her impudent challenge to contemporary conservatives views by the dress and customs she established in her community; her paean of praise for the power of music; and her adamant refusal, even at the advanced age of eighty, to give in to the demands of the male authorities even in the face of excommunication. (shrink)

The paper is guided by three goals. First, it shows that the methodological standpoint of classical Husserlian phenomenology provides us with reliable tools to resist the grand narratives that proliferate during times of war. Second, it demonstrates that phenomenology provides much-needed methodological support for hermeneutically-oriented reflections on war. Third, it shows how the gruesome reality of World War One introduced a practical turn in Husserl’s phenomenology by forcing Husserl to rethink the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. Tracing the (...) development of phenomenological metaphysics in Husserl’s Fichte lectures, Kaizo articles and private correspondence, the paper shows that, in response to war, Husserl deliberately chose not to engage in straightforward reflections on war, but instead to write about the prospects of peace. Reflections on cultural renewal necessitated him to rethink phenomenology as practical philosophy. The entanglement of praxis and theoria in Husserlian phenomenology relies upon the establishment of a metaphysically-grounded conceptual bond that ties reason to love and faith, which in its own turn suggests that a human being is not merely animal rationale, but also animal amans and animal religiosum. Ultimately, the possibility of cultural renewal relies upon a metaphysical broadening of Husserl’s conception of philosophy as rigorous sciences. (shrink)

'Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends,' wrote Isaiah Berlin to a correspondent. Flourishing inaugurates a keenly awaited edition of Berlin's letters that might well adopt this remark as an epigraph. Berlin's life was enormously worth living, both for himself and for us; and fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. The indiscretions- only part of the story, of course- are not those of Everyman. Berlin (...) is one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, the most famous English thinker of the post- war era, and the focus of growing interest and discussion. Above all, he is one of the best modern exponents of the disappearing art of letter- writing. When this volume opens Berlin is eighteen, a pupil at St Paul's School, London. He becomes an undergraduate at Oxford, then a Fellow of All Souls, where he writes his famous biography of Karl Marx. He then moves to New College to teach philosophy, and after the outbreak of the World War 2 sails to America in somewhat mysterious circumstances with Guy Burgess. He stays in the USA, working for the British Government, until July 1946, when he returns to Oxford. Berlin's letters are marvellously accessible, and as entertaining as a novel. During the two decades covered here we see his personality and career growing and blooming. In America he writes a regular telegram to his anxious parents, often saying just 'Flourishing'; the word is entirely apt, not only for his wartime experience, but for the whole of his early life, vividly displayed in this book in all its multi-faceted delightfulness. (shrink)

This penultimate volume of Santayana's letters chronicles Santayana's life during a difficult time--the war years and the immediate postwar period. The advent of World War II left Santayana isolated in Rome, and the difficulties of wartime travel across borders forced him to abandon plans to move to more agreeable locations in Switzerland or Spain. During these years, Santayana lived in a single room in a nursing home run by the "Blue Sisters" of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, (...) where, during the winter months, he did much of his writing in bed in order to stay warm. And yet, despite wartime deprivations, illness, and old age, Santayana was remarkably productive, completing both his autobiography Persons and Places and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: or God in Man, and all but completing Dominations and Powers. He confided to one correspondent that he had "never been more at peace or more happy."The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Seven are written to such correspondents as his friend and protégée Daniel Cory, his financial manager and heir George Sturgis, and the American poet Robert Lowell. The correspondence with Lowell--which began when the younger writer sent Santayana a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle--signals an important new friendship, which became a source of affection and intellectual engagement in Santayana's final years. (shrink)

Since the first selection of George Santayana's letters was published in 1955, shortly after his death, many more letters have been located. The Works of George Santayana, Volume V, brings together a total of more than 3,000 letters. The volume is divided chronologically into eight books of roughly comparable length. Book Two covers Santayana's first decade as a "freelance philosopher," following his resignation from Harvard University and move to Europe. Of particular interest is Santayana's continuing correspondence with the (...) American philosopher Charles Augustus Strong and with his sister Susana Sturgis de Sastre. Also included is correspondence with such notable figures as Bertrand Russell, Robert Seymour Bridges, Horace Kallen, and Logan Pearsall Smith. The correspondence covers Santayana's resignation from Harvard, his time in England during World War I, and comments on his philosophical work during this period. (shrink)

This first volume of letters inaugurates a keenly awaited edition of Berlin's letters. Berlin's life was enormously worth living, both for himself and for us; and fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. When this volume opens Berlin is eighteen, a pupil at St Paul's School in London. He becomes an undergraduate at Oxford, then a Fellow at All Souls, where he writes his famous biography of Karl Marx. When that (...) is complete he moves to New College to teach philosophy, and after the outbreak of the Second World War sails to America in somewhat mysterious circumstances with Guy Burgess. He stays in the USA, working for the British Government until July 1946, when he returns to Oxford, and the volume closes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Cosmopolitan Peirce:The Impact of His European ExperienceJaime Nubiola, Guest EditorKeywordsCharles S. Peirce, Europe, ScienceThe common image of Charles Sanders Peirce as an isolated thinker writing in Arisbe without any contact with the world is not only historically inaccurate, but also makes it difficult to understand some key elements of his philosophy. Charles S. Peirce traveled to Europe on five different occasions. The five trips occurred between the (...) years 1870 and 1883, all of them in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, at that time the chief scientific agency of the United States. Those trips—which covered a total of thirty-eight months—were a rich mixture of scientific research and tourism, of communication with other scientists and also of enjoying the artistic treasures of Europe. The impact of this extensive travelling was so relevant in Peirce’s life and thought that it makes perfect sense to identify this period of time as his “cosmopolitan period”—to use Max Fisch’s expression (Fisch 1986, 227).Peirce’s experiences of his European trips are lively reflected in his broad correspondence (professional and family letters), which until now has been unduly neglected by the scholarship, due in part to the difficulties accompanying access to it and in part to the general lack of interest from the analytic tradition in the biographical aspects of philosophy. We are convinced that the feelings that Peirce experienced in Europe were seeds which bore fruit in later years. A close study of Peirce’s letters and other documents of those years will help in avoiding a number of misunderstandings about his thought and its evolution by highlighting his active participation in the first line of several fields of cooperative scientific research (astronomy, geodesy, etc.). [End Page 425]In this issue we collect three papers presented at the 2014 Charles S. Peirce International Centennial Congress, authored respectively by Nathan Houser, Sara Barrena and myself. The first paper, written by Nathan Houser, describes how Peirce’s European experiences influenced the development of his thought and helped shape his philosophy. It appears likely that his thought was decidedly influenced by his intellectual and personal contact with European scientists and philosophers. So to understand Peirce as an American philosopher it is necessary to grasp that he was profoundly influenced by European thought and culture and to inquire how his American and European experiences worked together to form his ideas and shape him into the world-renowned philosopher he became.Sara Barrena’s paper focuses on Peirce’s aesthetics. While Peirce claims to not be well acquainted with aesthetics, he always was interested in that field. In spite of the fact that Peirce did not develop the issue in depth, aesthetics is at the foundation of the other normative sciences. Barrena suggests that the trips through Europe and the contemplation of so many works of art and of historic places left in his memory impressions that are at the basis of the importance that Peirce would assign to art and aesthetics in his later years.The final paper, by Jaime Nubiola, describes—with documental support from Peirce’s correspondence from his first and second European trips—Peirce’s conception of science as a collective and cosoperative activity of people whose lives are animated by the desire to find out the truth and by “an impulse to penetrate into the reason of things” (CP 1.44, c.1896). The paper deals with Peirce as an inventor and builder of research instruments around which scientific communities are built, and with Peirce’s own experience of cooperation in science.In sum, a close study of Peirce’s letters and other documents of his “cosmopolitan period” will help avoid certain misunderstandings about his thought and its evolution, highlighting his active participation in the first line of several fields of cooperative scientific research (astronomy, geodesy, etc.). A better understanding of Peirce’s activity in those years will provide a richer and more sympathetic approach to him, and correct that all too common but inaccurate image of Peirce as an isolated thinker.Jaime Nubiola, Guest EditorUniversidad de Navarra [email protected], Charles S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders... (shrink)

Carnap and Quine first met in the 1932-33 academic year, when the latter, fresh out of graduate school, visited the key centers of mathematical logic in Europe. In the months that Carnap was finishing his Logische Syntax der Sprache, Quine spent five weeks in Prague, where they discussed the manuscript “as it issued from Ina Carnap’s typewriter”. The philosophical friendship that emerged in these weeks would have a tremendous impact on the course of analytic philosophy. Not only did the (...) meetings effectively turn Quine into Carnap's disciple, they also paved the way for their seminal debates about meaning, language, and ontology---the very discussions that would change the course of analytic philosophy in the decades after the Second World War. -/- Yet surprisingly little is known about these first meetings. Although Quine has often acknowledged the impact of his Prague visit, there appears to be little information about these first encounters, except for the fact that the Quines “were overwhelmed by the kindness of the Carnaps” and that it was Quine’s “most notable experience of being intellectually fired by a living teacher”. Neither their correspondence nor their autobiographies offer a detailed account of these meetings. In this paper, I shed new light on Carnap’s and Quine’s first encounters by examining a set of previously unexplored material from their personal and academic archives. Why did Quine decide to visit Carnap? What did they discuss? And in what ways did the meetings affect Quine’s philosophical development? In what follows, I address these questions by means of a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s year in Europe based on a range of letters, notes, and reports from the early 1930s. (shrink)

The generation of American idealist philosophers came to an end effectively with the first World War. Idealism was superseded by a variety of philosophical schools: pragmatists, empiricists, positivists and latterly existentialists. Now there are signs of a return to idealism. The rising tide of social anomy, which the recent schools can do nothing to prevent, has directed men’s minds once more to the roots of community life. The writings of the idealists, hitherto dismissed as scarcely intelligible abstractions, are (...) now being read in chastened spirit with a new awareness of their purport. (shrink)

It was a novel, among other things, which originated the atomic bomb. H. G. Wells dedicated The World Set Free, published in 1913, to Frederick Soddy, a pioneer in the exploration of radioactivity. Using Soddy’s research as a base, Wells predicted the advent of artificial radioactivity in 1933, the year in which it actually took place; and he foresaw its use for what he named the “atomic bomb.” In Wells’ novel these bombs are used in a world war (...) that erupts in mid-century and is so catastrophic that a world government is formed, initiating a new age powered by the peaceful use of the atom. The physicist Leo Szilard, a long-time admirer of Wells, read this novel in 1932, the year before he first intuited the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. The novel seems to have become part of his own mental chain reaction. One that took place at an almost unconscious level during the spring that Szilard spent at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, by his own admission doing nothing. He would only monopolize the bath from around nine to twelve in the morning, since “there is no place as good to think as a bathtub.”1 The theories that resulted from this prolonged immersion were introduced by references to Wells; and Szilard, having realized the atomic bomb, spent the rest of his life trying to realize the world government which, in the Wells novel, was its consequence.Literature, which was part of the genesis of nuclear weaponry, continues to be an inextricable aspect of its nature. For Derrida, in fact, we are facinga phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously textual, through and through. Nuclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But the phenomenon if fabulously textual also to the extent that, at the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.2The linguistic nature of the arms race, of peace talks and negotiations, has been thoroughly analyzed. Likewise there is a growing number of books on the nature of nuclear war. But there is also a growing body of novels, poems, and plays making up a literature of nuclear holocaust. As the example of Wells’ novel shows, this is not altogether unprecedented; nuclear literature predates Hiroshima. But the subject of nuclear war has, up till now, mainly served the purposes of science fiction; only rarely—as in the cases of A Canticle for Leibowitz and On the Beach—have science fiction authors risen above the lowest common denominator of that genre. In the 1980s, every year sees the publication of works which demand serious attention both as literature and as fictive strategies for comprehending a subject that is commonly called “unthinkable.” Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace, Maggie Gee’s The Burning Book, Tim O’Brien’s Nuclear Age—these works explicitly preoccupied with nuclear holocaust may be supplemented by other works of the eighties with a persistent apocalyptic undertone, works such as Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s War of the End of the World. And these are only the literary manifestations of a widespread movement in all the arts aimed at expressing the dominant condition of our time.3 1. Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected Recollections and Correspondence, ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard , p. 19.2. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now ,” Diacritics 14 , p. 23.3. Examples can be found in painting , mixed media , opera , oratorio , dance , film , television , and popular music . Peter Schwenger is associate professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature, he is working on a book-length study of nuclear holocaust literature. (shrink)

The generation of American idealist philosophers came to an end effectively with the first World War. Idealism was superseded by a variety of philosophical schools: pragmatists, empiricists, positivists and latterly existentialists. Now there are signs of a return to idealism. The rising tide of social anomy, which the recent schools can do nothing to prevent, has directed men’s minds once more to the roots of community life. The writings of the idealists, hitherto dismissed as scarcely intelligible abstractions, are (...) now being read in chastened spirit with a new awareness of their purport. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of Books The title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of (...) essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance. Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind. Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Research Ethics after World War II: The Insular Culture of BiomedicineAllan M. Brandt (bio) and Lara Freidenfelds (bio)Human subjects research in the United States has only recently emerged as an important area of historical investigation. Over the last quarter century, scholars have begun the process of grounding within an historical context both the complex relationship between researchers and subjects and the processes by which biomedical knowledge is produced. (...) Their studies examine topics ranging from the impact of the anti-vivisectionist movement on human experimentation in the early twentieth century (Lederer 1995) to the development of the discipline of bioethics in the 1960s and 1970s (Rothman 1991) and the emergence of the legal concept of informed consent for human research (Katz, Glass, and Capron 1972). Many of the discussions focus on isolated incidents of scandal, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Jones 1993; Brandt 1978) and the Willowbrook School hepatitis study (Rothman and Rothman 1984). In doing so, they attempt to explain how such clearly unethical research could have been initiated and what consequences have resulted from public knowledge of such research.Nonetheless, the broader historical contexts and implications of human subjects research have yet to be fully delineated. This project will be of crucial importance, not only for historians, but also for those concerned with research policy and medical ethics. The historical examination of human subjects research will provide further insight into the details of research methods, the construction of protocols, and the historically specific interest in certain diseases. In addition, scholars will better understand the relationships of power and authority between researcher and subject, as well as the social and scientific mechanisms for the production of new biomedical knowledge. The process of enlisting research subjects illuminates the significance of class, gender, ethnicity, and race in science, in biomedicine, and in society. The fact that, historically, much research has employed research subjects from vulnerable populations, who participated in coercive contexts, has exposed powerful social assumptions embedded in the research enterprise. [End Page 239]The revelation of new documents indicating past abuses has sparked much of the investigation into human subjects research and the recent investigation of human radiation experiments during the Cold War era. One of the most important achievements of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was the uncovering of thousands of documents, a remarkable mine of archival data, that had been previously inaccessible to researchers. Jonathan Moreno and Susan Lederer’s article on the history of Cold War research ethics in this issue of the Kennedy Institute ofEthics Journal represents the first attempt since the publication of the Committee’s Final Report to analyze the Committee’s findings in a serious historical context.Historical accounts of the emergence of bioethics traditionally have left a great void in their discussions of human experimentation, generally ignoring the period between the writing of the Nuremberg Code in 1947 and the publication of Henry Beecher’s 1966 New England Journal ofMedicine article condemning systematic, unethical practices in human experimentation (Rothman 1991). The period from 1946 to 1966, however, was a time of vigorous research characterized by a fragmented community of medical researchers who applied inconsistent ethical standards and employed highly variable research practices. Both military and civilian medical researchers were intensely interested in radiation and thus conducted human subjects research along those lines, including examinations of the effects of plutonium injections and of total body irradiation, the use of trace radioisotopes to study various body processes, and observations of the effects of radiation intentionally released into the environment. The U.S. Government sponsored several thousand such studies (ACHRE 1995 [GPO, pp. 227–31; Oxford, pp. 135–38]), some of which were conducted on hospital patients, institutionalized children, military personnel, and prisoners. The Cold War scientific culture that produced this research must be examined from an historical ethical perspective.A central aspect of the culture of biomedical science after World War II was its insularity. Increasingly high standards of admission and challenging training had come to ensure that only a select group of individuals was admitted to the professions of medicine and research science. In this culture of experts, trustworthiness and ethical judgment were considered to be dependent upon expertise... (shrink)

The historiographical debate over the Great War continues. It does so because the public’s interest in this first total war of human history does not abate and because there is a plethora of histor...

Arthur Prior (1914-69) is regarded as New Zealand's greatest 20th-century philosopher. Until World War II, Prior seriously considered a career as a religious journalist, especially when traveling and living on the Continent and in England with his first wife. During these years, Prior wrote widely on theology and contemporary Christianity. In his correspondence with Ursula Bethell and Hugh Teague, Prior discusses in detail his religious and theological thoughts, including his shift from formal theological study into a world (...) of journalism and philosophy. These previously unknown letters, which cover the years from 1936 to 1941, chronicle a substantial part of a fascinating period in Prior's development, both theologically and philosophically, and have been transcribed and annotated for this volume. (shrink)

The first publication of seminal early writing by Louis Althusser. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser enjoyed virtually unrivalled status as the foremost living Marxist philosopher. Today, he is remembered as the scourge and severest critic of "humanist" or Hegelian Marxism, as the proponent of rigorously scientific socialism, and as the theorist who posited a sharp rupture—an epistemological break—between the early and the late Marx. This collection of texts from the period 1945-1953 turns these interpretations of Althusser on (...) their head: we discover that there was a "young Althusser" as well as the "mature Althusser" we are already familiar with. In his fascinating Master's thesis, "On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel" (1947), Althusser developed a position which he was later to attack ferociously: namely, that the revolutionary potential of the Hegelian dialectic could be defended against Hegel's own political conservatism. We see Althusser still wrestling with the spectres of Hegel and of Catholicism in another long text, his letter to Jean Lacroix, and, finally, we see his own "epistemological break" in the piece "On Marxism" from 1953. Other texts included are his critique of Alexander KojÅve (whose interpretation Francis Fukoyama has recently revived) and his attack on the French Church's teachings on women, sex and the family. Widely recognized as an intellectual giant of the late twentieth century, Althusser has left a towering legacy. This collection not only gives a unique insight into the formation of such a personality, but will also restore the "unknown Althusser" to the centre of the history of Marxism and of philosophy since the Second World War. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cogito Interruptus:The Epistolary Body in the Elisabeth-Descartes Correspondence, June 22, 1645-November 3, 1645Kyoo LeeCogito interruptus is typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols and symptoms. Like someone who, for example, points to the little box of matches, stares hard into your eyes, and says, "You see, there are seven...," then gives you a meaningful look, waiting for you to perceive the meaning concealed in that (...) unmistakable sign.Cogito interruptus is also typical of those who see the world inhabited not by symbols but by symptoms: indubitable signs of something that is neither here below nor up above, but that sooner or later will happen....Cogito interruptus is not a great prophetic, poetic, psychological technique. Only that it is ineffable. And it takes real faith in cogito interruptus—and a wish that readers understand me—for me to venture to speak of it, no matter what.—Umberto Eco, "Cogito Interruptus," Travels in HyperrealityIntroduction: Back to the Letters ThemselvesWhile looking through the private letters that the philosopher M. René Descartes (1596-1650) exchanged with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680) for the last seven years (1643-1650) of his life, I was fascinated [End Page 173] by the discussion of experiences of inconveniences, just small everyday interruptions that get in the way of the life of the so-called mind. They conversed and debated on matters ranging from metaphysical conundrums to psychosomatic troubles, on issues both extremely metaphysical and physical, ultimately impersonal and personal, all at once, such as pain; including other people's pain and especially other people as a pain. We are hardly short of such troubles in our own lives. The philosophical genius of Elisabeth, called by some "the first Cartesian" (Zedler 1989, 41), a title Descartes himself would not have deserved as he confesses but would have given her unreservedly (AT VI 325/CSM I 190-2), detects a fatal irony of an insulated and disciplined subjectivity.My concern in this paper is to keep alive Descartes's "mind-body problem" especially as a feminist issue. I am interested in reanimating that classical problem somehow otherwise. Here, I am hearing the voice of an unhappy and restless character, Elisabeth "la Grècque" (Nye 1999, 8), the autodidact who, embarrassed and curious, always has a question for the knowledgeable one, especially on that problem that mattered to her most. For some reason that becomes vitally important as we will see, the lady philosopher keeps reporting to the bearded one, without being asked to, how and how many times her act of letter writing has been interrupted by those around her who want every piece of her: "more than seven" at one point (Elisabeth to Descartes, Sept. 30, 1645, AT IV 303; Nye 1999, 64).From the early stage of correspondence that began in May 1643 and ended in December 1649 with Descartes's death, and specifically between June 22, 1645, and November 3, 1645, on which my analysis focuses, Elisabeth highlights, over and over again, this particular issue of sociomaterial obstacles and somatic disruptions in life. The young princess is constantly drawing and keeping the old philosopher's attention to the lived and living body; Descartes is relentlessly reminded of the blind spot in his carefully constructed house of the cogito, the mental foundation of selfhood. Consequently, almost precisely on November 3, 1645, just a year after publishing Principles of Philosophy (1644) where the key idea, floated between the two letter writers, on the obscure but "substantial" union of the mind and the body had already begun to surface, Descartes set out to pen the Passions of the Soul (1649) as a way of explicating answers to and for Elisabeth; she had been forcing him to think seriously and serially about the role of passions in the complementarily interactive relation between the mind and the body and, more significantly, the debilitating disrelations or dissonances between the two at times of psychosomatic troubles.What engages my attention here is the contextual porosity of epistolary cogitation: the bidirectional, transferential dance of the textured soul, in search of its truth. Call it an aesthetic phenomenology of correspondence; a [End Page 174] co... (shrink)

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was the first sustained theoretical critique of the French Revolution; and is now recognised as the classic statement of modern conservatism. Reflections surveys the British political culture of traditionalism, gradualism and deference, and contrasts it with the French Revolutionaries' programme of appeal to abstract right, transformational change and popular agency. Ultimately Burke advocated a counterrevolutionary war and the restoration of the French monarchy. This accessible new edition brings together for the first (...) time Burke's first and last published thoughts on the revolution including as it does the first Letter on a Regicide Peace; a work that has contributed to a particular view of international society. Featuring a comprehensive introduction and extensive annotations, Iain Hampsher-Monk's edition helps readers new to Burke to better understand the historical, political and philosophical context behind his writings, and the significance of contemporary and classical allusions. (shrink)

Between the two World Wars, in Belgrade and Serbia, seven musical journals were published:?Musical Gazette?,?Music?,?Herald of the Musical Society Stankovic?,?Sound?,?Journal of The South Slav Choral Union?,?Slavic Music? and?Music Review?. The influence of marxism can be observed in?Musical Herald?,?Sound? and?Slavic Music?. A Marxist influence is obvious through indications of determinism. Namely, some writers observed elements of musical art and its history as consequences of sociopolitical and economic processes. Still, journals published articles of domestic and foreign authors who interpreted the relation (...) between music, society and economy in a much more moderate and subtle manner. Editors and associates of these journals also had proscriptive ambitions - they recommended and even determined regulations for composers about what kind of music to write according to social goals and needs. According to tendencies in Marxism, there was a follow up of musical work in the Soviet Union. Editors tried not to be one-sided. There were writings about the USSR by left orientated associates as much as emigrants from that country, and articles of Soviet authors were translated. Also, there were critical tones about musical development in the first country of socialism. Serbian musical periodicals recognized the enormous threat from fascism. Also, there were articles about influence of Nazi ideology and dictatorship on musical prospects in Germany. Since Germany annexed Sudetenland in 1938,?Musical Herald? expressed support to musicians and people of that friendly country by devoting the October and November 1938 issue to Czechoslovak music, along with an appropriate introduction by the editor, Stana Djuric-Klajn. (shrink)

Loris Malaguzzi was one of the most important figures in 20th century early childhood education, achieving world-wide recognition for his educational ideas and his role in the creation of municipal schools for young children in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia, the most successful example ever of progressive, democratic and public education. Despite Malaguzzi’s reputation, very little of what he wrote or said about early childhood education has been available in English. This book helps fill the gap, presenting for (...) the first time in English, writings and speeches spanning 1945 to 1993, selected by a group of his colleagues from an archive established in Reggio Emilia. They range from short poems, letters and newspaper articles to extended pieces about Malaguzzi’s early life, the origins of the municipal schools and his ideas about children, pedagogy and schools. This material is organised into five chronological chapters, starting at the end of World War Two and ending just before his death, with introductions to each chapter providing background, including the historical context, the main events in Malaguzzi’s life and the rationale for the selection of documents. The book provides a unique insight into the background, thinking and work of Malaguzzi, revealing, in his own words, how his thinking developed, how he moved between theory and practice, how he border-crossed many disciplines and subjects, and how he combined many roles ranging from administrator and campaigner to researcher and pedagogue. Academics, students and practitioners alike will find this landmark publication provides rich insights into his life and work. (shrink)

Julius Caesar's "Bellum Ciuile" writes Caesar-articulates a particular construction of its subject: Caesar. The essay shows how writing in the civil war wins and loses the war, and how the writing of the Civil War exploits this throughout its course. The initial suppression of Caesar's letter to the senate in 49 BCE creates a lack which the rest of the text is to supply, and a structure of injustice inflicted on Caesar by villainous manipulation of communiqués. The narrative presents (...) Caesar's withheld claims over and again, in an ever-lengthening set of dramatized formulations and vindications, both in the form of his own behaviour and in its contrast with his enemies'. The many and various roles of writing in the civil war are examined, from orders and despatches to the propagandist war of words, and it is shown how the conflict is moralized through polarity between the letters sent by the two sides. Caesar presents himself as the last proconsular conqueror of the republic, playing the patriotic general from Gaul to Alexandria, where the "Bellum Ciuile" gives out-in time for this the first writer and mythographer of the Roman Empire to hide his hero's overthrow of the political order. It is argued that Caesar runs Bellum Gallicum and "Bellum Ciuile" together to make a seamless continuum, as a vital strategy for occluding, denying, and displacing civil war from the triumphant procession across a welcoming Roman world he offers in the "Bellum Ciuile". (shrink)

This article is one of the first sociological explorations of power struggles between intellectuals where matters of life and death are literally at stake. It counters the prevailing tendency within sociology to study intellectuals within confined academic institutions where power struggles are limited to matters of symbolic and institutional recognition. This study explores the conflict between collaborationist and Resistance intellectuals at the end of the Second World War in France, and it focuses in particular on the purge of (...) collaborationist intellectuals which culminated in several high profile trials. This article shows that the arguments and meta-arguments put forward in these trials led to broader intellectual debates outside the courtroom. These debates not only centred on the notion of the writer’s responsibility, but also dealt with anxieties about the disintegrative forces of modern society. Whereas collaborationist intellectuals portrayed their writing as either separate from politics or rescuing a defunct or degenerate nation, Resistance intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre were keen to portray collaborators as outsiders, both socially and sexually, lacking in social integration and subservient to a strong external force. The Resistance intellectuals saw the notion of individual responsibility not as antithetical but as integral to the remaking of the French nation, and this concept would become the cornerstone of the reshaping of the intellectual landscape in the post-war era in France. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a novel way of understanding the mechanisms of academic transfers in the context of the Second World War by looking at the role of membership and referral systems in determining an applicant’s success. Using largely unexplored archival data from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, held at the Bodleian Library, and the British Federation for University Women, held at the British Library of Political and Economic Science, this articles presents the case (...) of Rose Rand. She was a philosopher and one of the core members of the Vienna Circle who spent her professional years in exile, first in the United Kingdom and later in the United States. Her academic journey in the United Kingdom lasted almost 16 years. In that time, Rand never managed to obtain a permanent academic post despite the fact that her philosophical work is deemed relevant today by the experts and historians of her field. By reading and combining new and previously unused biographical data and personal and professional correspondence, this article shows the crucial role that memberships and personal referrals had in determining the success of her academic transfer. (shrink)

The fundamental goal of this paper is to clarify the importance of Husserl’s reflections on destiny (Schicksal) in the context of his post-WWI ethics. In the first section, I sketch Husserl’s reflections on war in his private correspondence. In the second section, I show that, in his post-WWI research manuscripts on ethics, Husserl conceptualized various forms of meaningless suffering under the heading of destiny. One of the main questions of Husserl’s post-WWI ethics can be formulated as follows: in the (...) dark horizon of senselessness, how is an ethical life possible? In the remaining sections, I show that Husserl’s reflections on this question led him to deformalize his earlier ethics and motivated him to ground his ethics of reason in an ethics of love. In the third and fourth sections, I sketch Husserl’s two fundamental answers to this question, the first of which concerns his phenomenology of love, while the second one – his phenomenological metaphysics in general, and his phenomenological teleology, in particular. While for Husserl, these answers are complementary, after clarifying Husserl’s view on the conflicts of values, I conclude with some reflections on the importance of not overlooking that these answers are analytically distinct. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'kvieuJs SELECTED· LETTERS KATHARINE TAIT Carn Voel Porthcurno,- Cornwall TRI9 6LN, England Nicholas Griffin. The Selected Letters ofBertrand Russel~ Vol. I: The Private Years, I884-I9I4. London: Allen Lane the Penguin PreSs, 1992. Pp. xxi, 553.£25.00; C$47.99; US$35·00. Nicholas Griffin has done an admirable job of selecting and explaining the letters in this first volume. It is amazingly to his credit that he 'manages to be so well acquainted (...) with and to understand so well a world so remote from his own. In the whole volume, I found only two small points on which to augment his knowledge. If he had looked up Shakespeare's poem about greasy Joan, which we all know in part, he would have solved for himself the mystery of Marian's nose, referred to on page 93. It was red and raw from the cold, as Russell's always was from sunburn in the summer-and usually peeling besides. And on page 217, perhaps a more esoteric mystery: Milligan is a game of patience played with two packs of cards, which I have seen him playing with a special small set capable of being spread out on a small table. My only other quibble is that I think perhaps Griffin is a trifle too hard on Grandmother Russell, who may have been less calculating and more sentimental than he supposes. That she was not above emotional blackmail is clear from Russell's letter to Alys of 17 August 1894: I went to· my Grandmother, and found her on the sofa in her sitting-room. We embraced in silence for some time and then I looked at her sadly with tears in my eyes and she said "Well I'm worse than you thought I was": not with an air of triumph, but of mild reproof for my heartlessness in having felt so little anxiery. She besought me to consent to an absence; she says everybody who comes thinks it strange I should not be here when she is so ill, and that both thee and I are suffering in reputation in consequence. She gave repeated assurances (which I didn't need) of her absolute unselfishness in urging my home-duties; she really does care only about my moral welfare, which she feels to be imperilled by such neglect. (P. 98) Awful stuff, yet I think she may have rather been seizing any weapon that came to hand than laying deeply cunning schemes; but this is only opinion and I would bow to Griffin's greater knowledge of the facts. His analysis of Evelyn Whitehead's "attacks",their effect on Russell and his relations with russell: me Journal of me Bemand Russell Archives McMaster University Libraty Pr... n.s. I> (winter 1992-9~): 211-24 ISSN OO~6-O1631. 212 Reviews her, on the other hand, I found enlightening and quite the best thing I have read on the subject. Some other fine items must be singled out for special mention. First, the generous tribute to Russell's integrity over Frege on page 245. Russell had spent five years working in almost complete isolation on the Principles only to find, when it had gone to press, that much of what was best and most original in it had been anticipated by Frege. Yet, even in his private correspondence, he never gave so much as a hint of any concern about his loss of priority, but only his delight at having found a thinker with similar ideas. It required an integrity beyond the call of duty to add to the Principles an appendix drawing attention to Frege's work and generally to do what he could to make it better known. Griffin's editorial work is for the most part adlJIirably dispassionate, always informative, sometimes speculative, occasionally critical; but when the occasion warrants (usually over professional matters), he is unstinting in his praise. Russell's comments about The Principles ofMathematics in his letters seem absurdly modest. The book was undoubtedly a wotk of genius; in some ways, the greatest thing he ever wrote.... (I]r offered not merely a new philosophy ofmathematics bur a new way of doing philosophy. Yet Russell... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crises of Memory and the Second World WarPatrick HenryCrises of Memory and the Second World War, by Susan Rubin Suleiman; x & 286 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. $29.95.This excellent study deals widely and deeply with the crises of memory and World War II but generally focuses on France, Vichy and the Holocaust. The author defines a crisis of memory as "a moment of (...) choice and sometimes of predicament or conflict, about remembrance of the past, whether by individuals or by groups" (p. 1). In the crises of memory she examines, "individual self-representation overlaps with... collective self-representation" in such a way that individual remembrance takes on collective significance. In nine rich chapters of textual analysis of mostly self-consciously literary texts, Suleiman deftly analyzes writers from the left and the right, two films of tremendous import, the nature of Holocaust memoirs, experimental writing and the concepts of trauma, amnesia, amnesty, testimony and forgiveness.In the first three chapters, Suleiman studies French memories of the Occupation, the collaborationist Vichy regime and the Resistance from 1945 to the present. These chapters depict the relations between history and memory and highlight the intriguing process of the evolution of public remembrance. Chapter one, "Choosing Our Past," surprises even the most careful reader of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays and novels, for it demonstrates brilliantly that, in several of his very early post-Vichy essays where he conveniently passes over in silence France's collaborationist past—even the major role played by Vichy police in the roundup and deportation of Jews—he helped create, along with de Gaulle and others, the myth of "Resistancialism," the founding myth of the post-Vichy [End Page 204] Period, the idea that all Frenchmen resisted the Nazis. In the words of Pierre Nora, Sartre and de Gaulle were "writing history from the point of view of the future" (p. 17).In chapter two, the author analyzes the 1997 "Aubrac Affair," exposing the problems that the Resistance heroes, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, encountered when they were suddenly suspected of having betrayed Jean Moulin, whose 1964 enshrinement in the Pantheon is examined in chapter three within the context of the politics of national memory in France. Whereas Moulin's enshrinement marked the apex of the myth of "Resistancialism" in France, the "Aubrac Affair" comes fifty-four years after the betrayal of Jean Moulin and twenty-five years after the myth of "Resistancialism" began to fade. In treating the charges and countercharges in the "Aubrac Affair," which continues to fascinate because it illustrates "the problematic relation between public and private memory, and between history and fantasy in the construction of both an individual and a collective past" (p. 61), Suleiman highlights the problems of narrative verisimilitude and the narrative tendency toward heroic aggrandizement as well as its opposite, the desire to topple heroes.In chapter four, Suleiman studies Marcel Orphuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a four-hour documentary of great significance that remains relatively unknown when compared with his earlier film, The Sorrow and the Pity. Barbie was the infamous Nazi war criminal, known as "the Butcher of Lyon," who tortured and deported hundreds of Jews and tortured to death the great French Resistance hero, Jean Moulin. He was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 where he was tried for crimes against humanity in 1987. Orphuls's film exposes the conflicted memories and partisanships produced by WWII and the Holocaust in public and private spaces throughout Europe and the Americas. This chapter will undoubtedly convince others of the film's importance. It will certainly convince the reader of Suleiman's ability to read film. She explains in detail Orphuls's method of "dialectical montage" (already evident in The Sorrow and the Pity) whereby he cuts up individual interviews and juxtaposes them with parts of others that often qualify or simply contradict what has been stated. This is why his films are "interactive documentaries" that "force the viewer into uncomfortable subject positions in relation to the material" (p. 87). No voice-over or "voice of God" commentary comes to aid the viewer who is forced to evaluate critically... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Seventh International Buddhist-Christian Conference:"Hear the Cries of the World"Darnise C. MartinThe SBCS Seventh International Conference honoring the ongoing Buddhist-Christian dialogue was hosted by Loyola Marymount University, June 3–8, 2005. The campus provided a picturesque and temperate backdrop to conversations, workshops, worship experiences, musical performances, and academic sessions inspired by the theme, "Hear the Cries of the World." This focus shaped our time together as we discussed (...) issues, both old and new, that continue to polarize our world and ways in which we might heal and grow into more holistic ways of being.Loyola Marymount University was pleased to welcome more than 120 participants from close to home and around the world. In addition to representation from many parts of the United States, we also had guests from Japan, Belgium, Germany, Korea, and Sweden. With such a diverse group having a range of needs and concerns, I was heartened to receive positive feedback from all of our attendees, who expressed their satisfaction with the programming and events as well as the general logistics, organization, and staff accessibility throughout the conference.The conference got underway with bittersweet opening ceremonies. We began with words of welcome to our international group, as well as expressions of sadness at the loss of David Chappell, founding member of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. David's memory was lifted up in the presence of his family, dear friends, and colleagues. The Society will carry on his work of dialogue, healing, and reconciliation.The conference had many highlights. One of the most notable features of the conference was the visually and musically stunning dance performance by Viji Prakash, [End Page 185] acclaimed international choreographer and dancer. Her dance troupe, Shakti Dance Company, performed "From Prince to Buddha: A Journey to Enlightenment," an energetic production based on the life of the Buddha. The audience was thoroughly enchanted and entertained by this performance.The academic sessions offered many and varied expressions of the theme, "Hear the Cries of the World." Scholars, activists, and clergy came together to present papers and personal experiences around issues of ecological healing, prison ministry, youth outreach, women's responses to poverty and injustice, as well as the traditional figures of compassion, the Virgin Mary, Kuan Yin, and the way of the Bodhisattva.In particular, our group was intensely moved through an evening presentation on prison ministry presented by two people working intimately in the area of bringing compassion to this field. One presenter was Fleet Maull, founder of the Prison Dharma Network and the National Prison Hospice Association, who has been in the prison system as an inmate himself. He shared the experiences that led to his incarceration as well as the dehumanizing ways in which people are treated as inmates. He spoke of meditation as a tool by which prisoners may develop awareness and regain their humanity, even if for only brief moments. These moments can maintain hope for people who otherwise would have none. Maull, who was ordained a Buddhist priest while in prison, began a ministry to provide hospice care to terminally ill inmates, a ministry that has continued after his release through a growing network of participating prisons.The second presenter, Beth Ross of First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) Church in Los Angeles, also discussed her work as part of the church's prison ministry outreach. Ross spoke about ministering not only to the person in prison, but also to the family of the inmate. Each has particular needs. The church has responded to prisoners' needs to not feel abandoned and isolated by instituting a letter-writing campaign. She said this helps people stay connected to a community and begin to heal. The church also provides re-entry support as prisoners are released and need to find housing and employment. Ross advocates for these former inmates needing a second chance. Without help, she notes, they are destined to commit further crimes against society and return to prison. FAME hopes to be a beacon of hope to these former prisoners.This was a powerful session for everyone. Speaking for myself, I had often thought about how society permanently demonizes former inmates. What chance do... (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the theoretical background and practical meaning of the so called war writings which emerged within the phenomenological movement during the First World War. The author exemplifies it by researching the works of two German representatives of this movement, Max Scheler and Kurt Stavenhagen. He focuses on their application of the phenomenological method to the analysis of Russian national identity, and historical as well as cultural foundations of Russian state. The paper’s (...) main thesis is that the politicization and militarization of phenomenology consisted in both “personalization” and “sociologization” of the phenomenological approach to the problem of the state. While interpreting Scheler’s personalism as an exemplification of the approach to the state as a problem of social ontology, the author reconstructs the theoretical conditions of analyzing the Russian imperial state in terms of the “world.” The focus of the paper is particularly on the phenomenology of, as Scheler put it, Russian collective personality and Russian national consciousness or “soul” as well as on the question of legitimacy of Ukrainian resistance against Russian imperialism. (shrink)

In 1932, Wolfgang Pauli was a world-renowned physicist and had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also in pain. His mother had poisoned herself after his father's involvement in an affair. Emerging from a brief marriage with a cabaret performer, Pauli drank heavily, quarreled frequently and sometimes publicly, and was disturbed by powerful dreams. He turned for help to C. G. Jung, setting a standing appointment for Mondays at noon. Thus bloomed (...) an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. Eighty letters, written over twenty-six years, record that friendship. This artful translation presents them in English for the first time. Though Jung never analyzed Pauli formally, he interpreted more than 400 of his dreams--work that bore fruit later in Psychology and Alchemy and The Analysis of Dreams. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli exchanged views on the content of their work and the ideas of the day. They discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics. Their collaboration resulted in the combined publication of Jung's treatise on synchronicity and Pauli's essay on archetypal ideas influencing Kepler's writings in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Over time, their correspondence shaped and reshaped their understanding of the principle they called synchronicity, a term Jung had suggested earlier. Through the association of these two pioneering thinkers, developments in physics profoundly influenced the evolution of Jungian psychology. And many of Jung's abiding themes shaped how Pauli--and, through him, other physicists--understood the physical world. Of clear appeal to historians of science and anyone investigating the life and work of Pauli or Jung, this portrait of an incredible friendship will also draw readers interested in human creativity as well as those who merely like to be present when great minds meet. (shrink)

The following text is the first ever translation into English of a writing by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (*1928). In it, Schmitz outlines and defends a non-mentalistic view of emotions as phenomena in interpersonal space in conjunction with a theory of the felt body’s constitutive involvement in human experience. In the first part of the text, Schmitz gives an overview covering some central pieces of his theory as developed, for the most part, in his massive System of Philosophy, (...) published in German in a series of volumes between 1964 and 1980. Schmitz’s System is centred on the claim that the contemporary view of the human subject is the result of a consequential historical process: A reductionist and ‘introjectionist’ objectification of lived experience culminating in the ‘invention’ of the mind (or ‘soul’) as a private, inner realm of subjective experience and in a corresponding ‘grinding down’ of the world of lived experienced to a meagre, value-neutral ‘objective reality’. To counter this intellectualist trend, Schmitz puts to use his approach to phenomenology with the aim of regaining a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived experience—hoping to make up for what was lost during the development of Western intellectual culture. Since both this text and the overall style of Schmitz’s philosophising are in several ways unusual for a contemporary readership, a brief introduction is provided by philosophers Jan Slaby and Rudolf Owen Müllan, the latter of whom translated Schmitz’s text into English. The introduction emphasises aspects of Schmitz’s philosophy that are likely to be of relevance to contemporary scholars of phenomenological philosophy and to its potential applications in science and society. (shrink)

Peter Byrne tells the story of Hugh Everett III (1930-1982), whose "many worlds" theory of multiple universes has had a profound impact on physics and philosophy. Using Everett's unpublished papers (recently discovered in his son's basement) and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, and surviving family members, Byrne paints, for the general reader, a detailed portrait of the genius who invented an astonishing way of describing our complex universe from the inside. Everett's mathematical model (called the "universal wave function") (...) treats all possible events as "equally real", and concludes that countless copies of every person and thing exist in all possible configurations spread over an infinity of universes: many worlds. Afflicted by depression and addictions, Everett strove to bring rational order to the professional realms in which he played historically significant roles. In addition to his famous interpretation of quantum mechanics, Everett wrote a classic paper in game theory; created computer algorithms that revolutionized military operations research; and performed pioneering work in artificial intelligence for top secret government projects. He wrote the original software for targeting cities in a nuclear hot war; and he was one of the first scientists to recognize the danger of nuclear winter. As a Cold Warrior, he designed logical systems that modeled "rational" human and machine behaviors, and yet he was largely oblivious to the emotional damage his irrational personal behavior inflicted upon his family, lovers, and business partners. He died young, but left behind a fascinating record of his life, including correspondence with such philosophically inclined physicists as Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and John Wheeler. These remarkable letters illuminate the long and often bitter struggle to explain the paradox of measurement at the heart of quantum physics. In recent years, Everett's solution to this mysterious problem - the existence of a universe of universes - has gained considerable traction in scientific circles, not as science fiction, but as an explanation of physical reality. (shrink)

In World War II, however, that lonely masculine authority of experience—the bitter authority derived from direct exposure to violence, injury, and mechanized terror—was rapidly dispersing among generally populations. Graves, notes, with some discomfort, that the Second World War soldier “cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher.”5 American culture was, obviously, characterized by far greater disjunctions between male and female “experience” of war than the British blitz society (...) Graves describes, and the modern tradition of soldier poetry, with its ironic emphasis on unmendable gaps between the soldier author and the civilian reader, retained its strong influence. Still, public discussions of war and literature in the United States dwell frequently on the new conjunctions between civilians and soldiers, front and home front, and men and women, focusing on their shared morale or effort as well as on their common deprivation and vulnerability.In a war newly perceived as “total,” [Marianne] Moore’s work could exemplify the power of a representative civilian voice. It could also represent modernism provisionally embracing realist and didactic functions, coming round to correcting earlier trends toward self-referentiality. Thus Richard Eberhart, arguing in his introduction to a well-known anthology of war poetry that “the spectator, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants,” praises Moore for abandoning the “complacencies of the peignoir” to write “In Distrust of Merits.”6 His phrasing links Moore with another civilian war poet, Wallace Stevens; by dressing Moore in Stevens’ Peignoir in order to show her doffing it, he represents her as a formerly feminine object of desire who has emerged from the coquetries of her sex into a new, superior, gender-free authority Now, Eberhart argues, “the bloodshed of which she writes has caused her to break through the decorative surface of her verse” to a “different kind of utterance.” For Eberhart, the poem’s value lies in its violation of Moore’s usual mannered aestheticism. She “breaks through” a feminine surface, as if puncturing skin, but the result is not a wound but a mouth: a “different kind of utterance,” in which “the meaning has dictated the sincerity.”7 Oscar Williams, in the preface to a comparable anthology, also reads the poem as a model of transparent earnestness, offering it as a solution to the problem of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the “bad” woman war poet who is excoriated in these discussions as often as Moore is extolled. Describing one of Millay’s war poems as “a sentimental piece of verse written by an American civilian, designed to be read by … people themselves out of danger because they are protected by a wall of living young flesh, much of which will be mangled,” Williams contrasts Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits”: But with true poets the poetry is in the pity …I ask the reader to study closely a war poem peculiarly fitted to illustrate my present thesis. It is also written by a woman, a civilian. “In Distrust of Merits,” by Marianne Moore, is the direct communication of honest feeling by one ready to search her own hear to discover the causes of war and accept her full share of responsibility for its effects.8 5. Graves, “The Poets of World War II,” p. 310.6. Richard Eberhart, “Preface: Attitudes to War,” in War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man’s Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present, ed. Eberhart and Selden Rodman , pp. xv, xiii.7. Ibid., p. xiii.8. Oscar Williams, ed., The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century , p. 6. Susan Schweik is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book manuscript entitled A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Poets and the Second World War. (shrink)