In examining the puzzle of experience, and its possible solutions, Valberg discusses relevant views of Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Strawson, as well as ideas from the recent philosophy of perception. Finally, he describes and analyzes a manifestation of the puzzle outside philosophy, in everyday experience.

What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise, sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several important social and political matters: first, that the United States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions which persist to this (...) day ; third, that this postwar period has been characterized, at the international level, by an extended cold war shadowed by the threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental. Whatever one’s political allegiances, these truths, surely, we hold as self-evident.Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and to the degree that it is “political” at all, it reflects and responds to that set of overriding circumstances.1 In my view the period ought to be seen as falling into two phases. The first phase stretches from about 1946 to 1973 . This period is dominated by a conflict between various lines of traditional poetry, on one hand, and the countering urgencies of the “New American Poetry” on the other. In the diversity of this last group Donald Allen argued for a unifying “characteristic”: “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”2Of course, this representation of the conflict between “tradition” and “innovation” obscures nearly as much as it clarifies. The New American poets were, in general, must moe inclined to experimentalism than were writers like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, or Donald Justice. But Allen’s declaration can easily conceal the academic and literary characteristics of the innovators. Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, for example, key figures in the New American Poetry, can hardly not be called “literary” or even “academic” poets. If they opened certain new areas in the field of poetic style, no less could and has been said of Lowell, even in his early work. And if Frank O’Hara seems the antithesis of academic work, John Ashbery is, in his own way, its epitome. Yet both appear in Allen’s New American Poetry anthology. Moreover, who can say, between O’Hara and Ashbery, which is the more innovative of the two—so different are their styles of experimentation? 1. Black and feminist writing in the United States often confines the focus of the political engagement to a more restricted national theater. Nevertheless, even in these cases engagement is necessarily carried out within the global framework I have sketched above.2. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen , p. xi. Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia. His most recent critical work, Buildings of Loss: The Knowledge of Imaginative Texts, will appear in 1987. “Some Forms of Critics Discourse” and “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rosetti” are among his previous contributions to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Can poetry tell the truth? This question has embarrassed and challenged writers for a long time. While the question may be addressed at both an ethical and an epistemological level, its resonance is strongest when the ethico-political issues become paramount—as they were for both Socrates and Plato.Today the question appears most pressing not among poets but among their custodians, the critics and academicians.1 Whether or not poetry can tell the truth—whether or not it can establish an identity between thought and (...) its object—has become an acute problem for those who are asked to bring critical judgment to the matter. To the extent that a consensus has been reached, the judgment has been negative. That poetry develops only a metaphorical and nonidentical relation between thought and its object is the current general view. 1. This crisis has been widely debated; my own contribution to the discussion may be found in Social Values and Poetics Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work . The critique of Plato in the early sections of this work is particularly relevant to the question of poetry’s truth-functions. The same subject is pursued further in the sequel, Toward a Literature of Knowledge . Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. The Textual Condition is his most recent critical work, and he is the editor of the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. (shrink)

The project begins by drawing two basic distinctions. The first distinction is between forms of ideological discourse in general, which may not be critical in their orientation, and those forms of critical discourse which are historically self-conscious in their method. The formal antitype of all critical discourse is, in this view, the discourse of interpretation. The second distinction separates forms of critical thought from forms of critical discourse. Unlike the latter, forms of thought do not require for their existence the (...) operation of an explicit set of signs or system of objective articulation.One further introductory point is in order. I believe that the elementary forms of critical discourse should be divided into two large categories: the narrative forms, on the one hand, and the nonnarrative forms, on the other. Furthermore, I suggest that the nonnarrative forms—which are my chief concern in this paper—comprise four elementary types: the hypothetical ; the practical or injunctive ; the array; and the dialectic. I shall concentrate on the nonnarrative forms, and in particular on the array and the dialectic, for two reasons: first, one of these, the array, is not normally recognized as a form of critical discourse; and, second, both the array and the dialectic offer especially clear contrasts with narrative forms of discourse, both critical and noncritical.1 1. Some brief comments on the other two nonnarrative forms may be useful. Perhaps the best examples of a practical or injunctive form are furnished in a book like Euclid’s Elements, or any cookbook. The hypothetical form may be illustrated out of any number of classic works such as Sir Humphry Davy’s “On Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity” and Michael Faraday’s “Electricity from Magnetism” . Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. A new book, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory , continues the critical projects of his recent books The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism . His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti”. (shrink)

… [T]he scandals surrounding the work of these men are as nothing compared to the scandal of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. We are amused to think that anyone ever felt Byron might have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know. We are not amused by the Cantos. Like Pound’s letters and so much of his prose, the Cantos is difficult to like or enjoy. It is a paradigm of poetic obscurity because its often cryptic style is married to materials which are (...) abstruse, learned, even pedantic. The poem also makes a mockery of poetic form; and then there are those vulgar and bathetic sinking which it repeatedly indulges through its macaronic turns of voice.All that is scandalous, but the worst has not been said. For the Cantos is a fascist epic in a precise historical sense.1 Its racism and anti-Semitism are conceived and pursued in social and political terms at a particular point in time and with reference to certain state policies. Those policies led to a holocaust for which the murder of six million Jews would be the ultimate exponent. That is truly scandalousFor anyone convinced that works of imagination are important to human life, however, the scandal takes a last, cruel twist. Pound’s magnum opus is one of the greatest achievements of modern poetry in any language. That is more a shocking than a controversial idea. It shocks because it is outrageous to think so; but it is in fact a commonplace judgment passed on the poem by nearly every major writer and poet of this century. The greatness of the Cantos was an apparent to Pound’s contemporaries as it has been to his inheritors, to his enemies as to his friends, to those who have sympathized with Pound’s ideas and to those who have fought against them. 1. See John Lauber, “Pound’s Cantos: A Fascist Epic,” Journal of American Studies 12 : 3-21; Victor C. Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism,” Journal of Politics 17 : 173-97. Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia. This essay was originally one of the Clark Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently one of the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

I want to argue…that to read Rossetti’s religious poetry with understanding requires a more or less conscious investment in the peculiarities of its Christian orientation, in the social and historical particulars which feed and shape the distinctive features of her work. Because John O. Waller’s relatively recent essay on Rossetti, “Christ’s Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the Premillenarianist William Dodsworth,” focuses on some of the most important of these particulars, it seems to me one of the most useful pieces of (...) scholarship ever written on the poet. The essay locates the special ground of Rossetti’s religious poetry in that peculiar Adventist and premillenarian context which flourished for about fifty years in mid nineteenth-century culture. In point of historical fact—and it is a historical fact which has enormous significance for the aesthetic character of Rossetti’s poetry—her religious verse is intimately meshed with a number of particular, even peculiar, religious ideas.18 From the vantage of her strongest poetry, the most important of these ideas were allied to a once powerful religious movement which later—toward the end of the century—slipped to a marginal position in English culture.The whole question [of premillenarianism] was overshadowed first and last by the Tractarian Movement, Anglo-Catholicism, and the resulting Protestant reaction. And we can see in retrospect that all through the years [1820-1875] the theological future actually belonged to liberal, or Broad Church, principles. By the middle 1870s, apparently [the issues raised through the premillenarian movement] were no longer very alive.19­­In this context we may begin to understand the decline of Rossetti’s reputation after the late nineteenth century, when she was still regarded as one of the most powerful and important contemporary English poets. Her reputation was established in the 1860s and 1870s, when Adventism reached the apogee of its brief but influential career. Thereafter, the availability of religious poetry was mediated either through the Broad Church line or through the High Church and Anglo-Catholic line . The premillenarian and evangelist enthusiasm which supported Rossetti’s religious poetry had been moved to the periphery of English culture when the canon of such verse began to take shape in the modern period.To read Rossetti’s poetry, then, we have to willingly suspend not only our disbelief in her convictions and ideas but also our belief in those expectations and presuppositions about religious poetry which we have inherited from those two dominant ideological lines—Broad Church and High Church and Anglo-Catholic. Waller has drawn our attention to the general premillenarian content of her work, and I should like to follow his lead by emphasizing another crucial and even more particular doctrinal feature of her poetry. 19. Waller, “Christ’s Second Coming,” p. 477. For a general discussion of millenarianism in the early nineteenth century, see J. E. Harrison, The Second Coming, Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 . Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His two most recent books are The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism . His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again” and “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner”. (shrink)

Teachers and critics have much to learn from [Harold] Bloom's work, and in this paper I want to try to show what it is we can learn from him and how we might go about it. In doing so, I also mean to analyze his attack upon formal criticism and to consider the merits of that attack. In the end, I propose an assessment of what in my view is the crucial weakness of both formal and dialectical criticism alike. This (...) will involve an explication of the meaning of critical care and an enlargement of our customary understanding of critical method and procedure. . . . In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom presents theory based frankly upon Freudian models, or what Bloom calls Family Romance. Every new poet is caught up in a struggle with his forebears, or precursors. Being Freudian forebears, they naturally both teach the poet and threaten him as teachers. The problem for the poet is to learn from his forebearing family without losing his integral self. If he succeeds he becomes what Bloom calls a "strong poet," and, hence, again quite naturally, he lives to present much trouble to coming generations, who have their own paths to go. Jerome McGann, professor of English at John Hopkins University, has written books on Byron and Swinburne and is presently working on the Oxford English Text edition of Byron's Complete Poetical Works, Don Juan in Context, and a collection of poetry, Air Heart Sermons. See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1. (shrink)

What does "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" mean? This question, in one form or another, has been asked of the poem from the beginning; indeed, so interesting and so dominant has this question been that Coleridge's poem now serves as one of our culture's standard texts for introducing students to poetic interpretation. The question has been, and still is, an important one, and I shall try to present here yet another answer to it. My approach, however, will differ slightly (...) from the traditional ones, for I do not believe that we can arrive at a synthetic answer until we reflect upon the meaning of the question itself. I will begin, therefore, by reconsidering briefly the history of the poem's criticism. . . . A poem like the "Rime" encourages, therefore, the most diverse readings and interpretations. Since this encouragement is made in terms of the Christian economy, the interpretations have generally remained within the broad spiritualist terms, "heathen" terms, in Newman's view, which Coleridge's mind had allowed for. The historical method of the "Rime," however, had also prepared the ground for a thoroughly revisionist view of the poem, in which the entire ideological structure of its symbolist procedures would finally be able to be seen in their special historical terms. (shrink)

This initial volume in a series of new translations of Plato’s works includes a general introduction and interpretive comments for the dialogues translated: the _Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, _and _Menexenus. _ _ _“Allen’s work is very impressive. The translations are readable, lucid, and highly accurate. The general introduction is succinct and extremely clear. The discussion of the dating of the dialogues is enormously useful; there has previously been no brief account of these issues to which one could refer the (...) student. Finally, the particular introductions are first rate: fine jobs of clear philosophical and historical explanation—succinct and yet sophisticated, both close to the text and philosophically incisive.”—Martha Nussbaum, _Brown University_ “This is an important work that deserves our respect and attention.”—_Ethics _ _ _“This and the promised succeeding volumes will probably become the standard English version of the complete dialogues…. The commentaries take advantage of the best scholarship, judge judiciously between divergent views, and often introduce new and brilliant interpretations. This is true both in the area of philosophy and in that of literary criticism.”—Anthony C. Daly, S.J., _Modern Schoolman_ _ _“Allen is a superb translator, whose elegantly simple yet precise language gives access to Plato both as a philosopher and as a literary artist.”—_Library Journal__ _ “An important event in the world of scholarship.”—_London Review of Books_ _ _R.E. Allen is professor of classics and philosophy at Northwestern University. (shrink)

"Might this be a dream?" In this book, distinguished philosopher J. J. Valberg approaches the familiar question about dream and reality by seeking to identify its subject matter: what is it that would be the dream if "this" were a dream? It turns out to be a subject matter that contains the whole of the world, space, and time but which, like consciousness for Sartre, is nothing "in itself." This subject matter, the "personal horizon," lies at the heart of (...) the main topics--the first person, the self, and the self in time--explored at length in the book. The personal horizon is, Valberg contends, the subject matter whose center each of us occupies, and which for each of us ceases with death. This ceasing to be presents itself solipsistically not just as the end of everything "for me" but as the end of everything absolutely. Yet since it is the same for everyone, this cannot be. Death thus confronts us with an impossible fact: something that cannot be but will be. The puzzle about death is one of several extraphilosophical puzzles about the self that Valberg discusses, puzzles that can trouble everyday consciousness without any contribution from philosophy. Nor can philosophy resolve the puzzles. Its task is to get to the bottom of them, and in this respect to understand ourselves--a task philosophy has always set itself. (shrink)

This book discusses the puzzle about death which is one of several extra-philosophical puzzles about the self. "Valberg's book is thoughtful, original, and challenging.

It is easy to have about the temporal present, the time that is now, thoughts that seem both true and impossible. E.g., ‘Now is the time that matters'. We may reflect that this is not just true but that ‘it is always like that', that is: now is always the time that matters. Yet here we seem to be generalizing the ascription to the temporal present of a property that claims uniqueness, viz., being the time that matters. The present paper (...) explores, in the case of the temporal present, the meaning and implications of this kind of impossible generalisation. (shrink)

It is easy to have about the temporal present, the time that is now, thoughts that seem both true and impossible. E.g., ‘Now is the time that matters'. We may reflect that this is not just true but that ‘it is always like that', that is: now is always the time that matters. Yet here we seem to be generalizing the ascription to the temporal present of a property that claims uniqueness, viz., being the time that matters. The present paper (...) explores, in the case of the temporal present, the meaning and implications of this kind of impossible generalisation. (shrink)

J. J. Valberg; VIII*—Improper Singular Terms, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/a.

J. J. Valberg; VIII*—Improper Singular Terms, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/a.

This paper aims first, to introduce and elaborate upon a certain principle about being (existence), roughly, that once something exists or has being, it cannot lose it: what is cannot, in this sense, unbe; and second, to apply this principle to a well-known issue in the philosophy of time, viz., that of whether future events, like past events, though of course not now occurring, nonetheless have being.

The main thesis of this paper is that we have an irrational tendency to be over-impressed by success. The thesis is discussed mainly with reference to examples drawn from sport, where the role played by luck is crucial; but a brief attempt is made to generalize the thesis to other areas of life.

The influence of light on the lives of living organisms is all-pervasive, affecting movement, vision, behavior, and physiological activity. This book is a biophysically grounded comparative survey of how animals detect light and perceive their surroundings. Included are discussions of photoreceptors, light emitters, and eyes. The book focuses in particular on the kinds of optical systems that have evolved, beginning with unicellular organisms that detect and respond to light through to more advanced and complex designs for imaging. The relevance of (...) these studies extends beyond biology, since these findings can be used to help develop photoreceptor energy conversion and information systems, and optical imaging devices with a wide range of everyday applications. The book will appeal to biophysicists, photobiologists, bioengineers, neuroscientists, and all researchers working in the area of vision and visual optics. (shrink)

How do people make difficult decisions in situations involving substantial risk and uncertainty? In this study, we presented a difficult medical decision to three expert physicians in a combined “thinking aloud” and “cross examination” experiment. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed using script analysis to observe the process of constructing and making the decision, and using referring phrase analysis to determine the representation of knowledge of likelihoods. These analyses are compared with a formal decision analysis of the same problem to highlight similarities (...) and differences. The process of making the decision resembles an incremental, sequential‐refinement planning algorithm, where a complex decision is broken into a sequence of choices to be made with a simplified description of the alternatives. This strategy results in certain kinds of relevant information being underweighted in the final decision. Knowledge of likelihood appears to be represented as symbolic descriptions capturing categorical and ordinal relations with “landrhark” likelihoods, only some of which are described numerically. Numerical probabilities, capable of being combined and compared arithmetically, were not observed. These observations suggest an explanation for the heuristics and biases in human decision making under uncertainty in terms of the processes that manipulate symbolic descriptions of likelihoods and construct plans of action for situations involving risk and uncertainty. (shrink)