Seeing-as and Novelty brings together new essays that consider Wittgenstein’s treatment of the phenomenon of aspect perception in relation to the broader idea of conceptual novelty; that is, the acquisition or creation of new concepts, and the application of an acquired understanding in unfamiliar or novel situations. Over the last twenty years, aspect perception has received increasing philosophical attention, largely related to applying Wittgenstein’s remarks on the phenomena of seeing-as, found in Part II of Philosophical Investigations , to issues within (...) philosophical aesthetics. Seeing-as, however, has come to occupy a broader conceptual category, particularly in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. The essays in this volume examine the exegetical issues arising within Wittgenstein studies, while also considering the broader utility and implications of the phenomenon of seeing-as in the fields of aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mathematics, with a thematic focus on questions of novelty and creativity. The collection constitutes a fruitful interpretative engagement with the later Wittgenstein, as well as a unique contribution to considerations of philosophical methodology. (shrink)

Challenging the public dichotomy characterizing fathers as “involved” or “absentee,” we investigate racial variation in college men’s perceptions of their paternal relationships and the gendered constructions these promote. The analysis draws on intensive interviews with Asian American, Black, and white sons from one university and survey data from 24 institutions. In both data sets, Asian Americans and Blacks describe greater paternal distance than do whites. This conceals variations in sons’ understanding of fathers. Asian Americans often criticize their fathers’ distance, disidentifying (...) with the near-exclusive focus on breadwinning they describe among fathers. In contrast, Blacks and whites normalize and identify with their dads. Blacks emphasize the “laid-back,” “cool” masculinity their dads impart, while whites often emphasize the independent masculinity based on mentorship and friendship their dads offer. Recasting sociological theories, we argue these differences emanate from divergent structural contexts, but more importantly, cultural conceptions of fatherhood, race, and gender as well as public discussions that valorize white models of fatherhood. (shrink)

The Song and Ming dynasty Confucians make frequent use of what would today be identified as a slippery slope argument. The Book of Changes and its early commentaries provide both the language and the rationale for this argument, inasmuch as the Confucians regard these texts as a method for identifying tiny problems that will one day threaten the state. While today the slippery slope argument is often criticized for promoting an unreasoned resistance to change, a close look at its use (...) by Confucians reveals that they largely avoid this criticism, using the argument in a reasoned way to target not change, but excess. (shrink)

The luminaries of late thirteenth-century Europe took great interest in the mysterious fifth-century author known as Dionysius the Areopagite. They typically read Dionysius not in the original Greek, but in a Latin edition prepared sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century. This edition, which appeared first in Paris and later circulated all over Western Europe, was no mere translation. In addition to the famous translation made by Eriugena in the ninth century, it contained translations of scholia on the Dionysian (...) texts made by Anastasius the Librarian, alternative readings provided by Anastasius and other Latin readers, as well as excerpts from Eriugena's own theological masterwork, the Periphyseon. University scholars such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas thus learned Dionysian mystical theology not only from his text, but from the seven-hundred year interpretive tradition that literally surrounded it on the page. (shrink)

The world's first permanent international criminal tribunal for the prosecution and punishment of the world's most serious crimes was created in 2002. In Bringing Power to Justice? legal scholars, political scientists, and political philosophers respond to fundamental questions about the future of this court and international criminal justice. For instance, will the ICC be undermined by political constraints, given the opposition of major powers, including the United States? What are the implications of holding heads of state responsible for international crimes? (...) Are trials the best response to state crime or would other devices (such as truth commissions) be more suitable? Is retributive justice an appropriate response? The contributors offer indispensable and thoughtful assessment of the future of international criminal justice. (shrink)

François Jullien is a master of repetition. Over his more than thirty books, he introduces a carefully defined set of concepts--such as “blandness” and “efficacy”--and then pairs them, opposes them, and sets them in different contexts, returning to them repeatedly without ever saying quite the same thing. One can imagine an introduction to Jullien’s work that traces each of his concepts through its development from book to book, noting explicit and implicit connections to the traditional Chinese thought that gave rise (...) to it. In François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought, Arne De Boever takes a different tack. As he puts it in his introduction: “I focus on certain books and topics that stood out to me within Jullien’s... (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to show that American capitalism is not viable in the long run, in the twenty-first century. Three points are elucidated in this discussion: (1) capitalism is a system of private socialization; as such, it tends to conflict with the private mode of allocation and to create crisis. It is, moreover, out of date, for it cannot, for example, cope with new phenomenon of inflation and unemployment. (2) Private executives do not empirically make the wisest decisions. (...) (3) In fact, most businessmen do not want the government out of the economy; on the contrary, they want the government in the economy, on their side. (shrink)

The confirmatory nature of the empirical evidence used to establish UG effects in L2 development is considered. Specific issues are also raised concerning the internal validity of Epstein et al.'s findings. It is concluded that the role of UG in adult L2 development will only be established when researchers better understand the interaction between the development of UG-constrained structural knowledge and the development of overall L2 proficiency.

The medieval fascination with the mysterious language of Dionysius the Areopagite is nowhere more evident than in the thirteenth-century textbook edition of his treatise on liturgical rites. Dionysius employed unfamiliar Greek to describe people, actions, and texts that would have been perfectly familiar to his readers. The Latin translation used in the thirteenth-century textbook strives to preserve this unfamiliarity, but commentaries are introduced between its lines and paragraphs, disrupting its ability to bewilder and surprise. These commentaries make the Dionysian text (...) less mysterious, while also slightly altering its meaning. In the hands of the commentators, Dionysius becomes less interested in the aesthetic mystery of the liturgy, and more interested in credal orthodoxy. To read text and commentary together is to confront seven hundred years of competing voices speaking on the nature and purpose of the Christian church. (shrink)

The classical Western concept of place points in two directions: toward isolating things from one another and toward articulating their connections. Aristotle’s famous definition of a thing’s place as the limit of its surrounding body, which serves to isolate the thing from all but its immediate surroundings, sits side-by-side in the Physics with his theory of natural places, according to which things have places only in relation to each other.1 A thing’s natural place may be at the center—as the earth (...) is at the center of the cosmos in the classical theory—but the center exists only with respect to the periphery, and vice versa. Likewise, a thing can be below only in relation to something above it. The relationship... (shrink)

The Dionysian corpus makes virtually no statement about the authority of kings or the structure of nations, but it has nevertheless repeatedly been the subjectof political analysis. Several scholars have recently sketched out a Dionysian politics by drawing analogies between the Dionysian church and the city, and between the Dionysian bishop and the emperor. These analogies are of limited usefulness. They show that Dionysius does employ Platonic political language to describe the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but they risk overlooking or downplaying the (...) hierarchy’s non-temporal, and therefore non-political, activity. A more fruitful ground for developing a Dionysian politics may be found in his brief discussion of the legal hierarchy, which provides practical instruction for action in the temporal realm without direct reference to the contemplative activity of the church. (shrink)

The twentieth century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively postmodern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism traces the appearance and development of sacred place in the writings of Neoplatonists from (...) the third to ninth centuries, and sets them in the context of present-day debates over place and the sacred. (shrink)

Apparently alone among medieval Christians, Eriugena argues that all life is immortal. He relies on Plato’s Timaeus as his primary source for this claim, but he modifies the argument of the Timaeus considerably. He turns Plato’s cosmic soul into the genus of life, thereby taking a treatise that originally dealt with cosmology and using it to explore the ontological significance of definition. All species that fall under the genus of life must be immortal, because a mortal species would contradict the (...) genus. No later medieval author would take up Eriugena’s arguments explicitly, although Aquinas comes close. The two thirteenth-century thinkers to address universal immortality seriously—Aquinas and Bonaventure—argue against it, but they are more faithful than Eriugena himself to a literal reading of the Timaeus. (shrink)

Argues that the concept of God is vanishing, causing a widespread erosion of moral and social values, and calls for a union between faith and anti-faith to create a society in which people can discover new values.

Erwin Panofsky developed the postulate of clarification to explain the mental habit common to Gothic architecture and Western medieval scholasticism, but the postulate is equally applicable to the commentary tradition of Song-dynasty China. The commentary on the Book of Changes authored by Cheng Yi (1033–1107) provides a good example of how the Confucians of the Song dynasty took their concern for clarity to a recognizably medieval extreme. By looking at how Cheng Yi understands and foregrounds the clarity of the Book (...) of Changes, we can begin to see both what was medieval about Song-dynasty China and why the medieval method continues to be viable for interpreters of the Book of Changes. (shrink)

Monograph analysing the economic theory of Marxism as it applies to the transition of capitalism to collective economy - examines the political aspects, economic implications and historical process of decline in affluent society and the welfare State. Bibliography pp. 421 to 431 and references.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Clement of AlexandriaL. Michael HarringtonEric Osborn. Clement of Alexandria. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii + 324. Cloth, $85.00.With Clement of Alexandria, Eric Osborn returns to the subject of his 1957 book, The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria, but its style and themes more closely resemble his more recent studies of second-century Christian thinkers: Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge, 1997) and Irenaeus of (...) Lyons (Cambridge, 2001). Osborn's Clement, Tertullian, and Irenaeus are bound together by more than the century in which they happened to live. They share an optimism—a confidence that the world is finally comprehensible—and an argumentative theology, developed in response to the Gnostics, who, Osborn says in his book on Irenaeus, "were strong on picture and myth but weak on argument" (xiii).Osborn's approach to Clement is, as he describes it, analytic or problematic, meaning that "we simply ask what problems forced Clement to write and where he found Christian teaching in need of elucidation" (xii-xiii). Three problems concern Clement: (1) "how can the narrative of the kerygma (what God does) be translated into a metaphysic (who God is)?"; (2) "how two distinct beings, father and son, constitute one God"; and (3) "an answer had to be found for those who divided faith and knowledge." Each problem is addressed by means of a theme—divine economy for the first, reciprocity for the second, and salvation by faith for the third—and each of the book's three major parts devotes itself to one of these themes.Having laid out this systematic division, Osborn generally follows the logic of Clement's own thought rather than an imposed structure, developing his argument by careful collation and paraphrase. As a result, by the end of the book, the reader will feel thoroughly and effortlessly initiated in Clement's major works: the Protrepticus, the Paedagogus, and the Stromateis. The book thus serves as a thorough introduction to Clement, without aiming so low that it is of no interest to the scholar.Osborn's central argument unfolds from his observation that "Clement, more than any other early Christian writer, knew and enjoyed Greek philosophy and literature" (2). Clement defends the rationality shared between Christians and Greeks against the irrationalists of his time: the theosophers, or Gnostics (215). Osborn, in turn, defends Clement against the irrationalists of our own time, represented in his book by Wolfhart Pannenberg. The "divine irrational freedom" praised by Pannenberg is replaced in Osborn's Irenaeus and Clement by "universal wisdom" (47). The universality of wisdom allows great and dispassionate natures to reach the truth—whether they are Christians or Greeks—though each is like one limb of the truth, severed from the rest. Convinced that Christ will reunite these disiecta membra, "Clement converses with them and joins their broken lights" (104).In footnotes and parenthetical references throughout the book, Osborn argues against the approaches to Clement in doxography and Discourse Power theory, precisely because they are unable to treat him as a philosopher (79). The doxographer can show Clement's dependence on earlier philosophers, but is unable to see how he differs from them (xii). The Discourse Power theorist can see that Clement's system differs from the Gnostic system, but is able to explain the difference only as a competition between two social structures, without seeing that only one of them aspires to logical coherence (215).This dismissal of doxography and Discourse Power theory may strike the reader as too thoroughgoing, especially if we distinguish, as Osborn himself does in his book on Tertullian, philosophy as "a matter of system and speculation" from philosophy as "a matter of argument" (198). Clement's optimism depends on his confidence in system and speculation, in so far as they can be defended by argument. But if argument can defend two different systems equally well, then we may wonder why Clement chooses the system he does. Here the doxographer, who can show the provenance of his thought, becomes essential, as does the Discourse Power theorist, who can set Clement's choice of system in the context of the contemporary social fabric that inevitably affects even the... (shrink)

This book is a translation of a key commentary on the Book of Changes, or Yijing, perhaps the most broadly influential text of classical China. The Yijing first appeared as a divination text in Zhou-dynasty China and later became a work of cosmology, philosophy, and political theory as commentators supplied it with new meanings. While many English translations of the Yijing itself exist, none are paired with a historical commentary as thorough and methodical as that written by the Confucian scholar (...) Cheng Yi, who turned the original text into a coherent work of political theory. (shrink)

The requirement of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business to include business ethics in the curriculum has prompted business programs to teach ethics either integrated across the curriculum or in standalone classes. The question addressed here is how to engage students in thinking deeply and empathetically about ethical issues impacting corporate social responsibility. This research focused on using a thought experiment developed by John Rawls in which students examined CSR issues from the perspective of six stakeholder groups. A (...) pre-test/post-test design measured the effectiveness of an instruction module on CSR coupled with an active exercise using Rawls’ veil of ignorance and original position. Results indicate that students placed greater responsibility on the stockholders and board of directors after taking this module. The implication of the Rawlsian technique to use stakeholder empathy is discussed as a tool for engaging business ethics students. (shrink)

It was [Maria] Edgeworth’s deeply personal motive in writing Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future writers the way to move (...) beyond it. In short, she boldly turned her personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a disorder in “the imaginations of the good people of England,”4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up in subsequent novels : the tradition I am designating “the novel of Jewish Identity” attempts to articulate, investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice’s function as the English master text for representing “the Jew.” Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, vol. 9 of Tales and Novels , p. 148; hereafter cited by page number. Michael Ragussis, professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction . He is currently working on a book-length study entitled “Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British Fiction.”. (shrink)