This paper argues that there were women involved with philosophy on a fairly constant basis throughout Greek antiquity. It does so by tracing the lives and where extant the writings of these women. However, since the sources, both ancient and modern, from which we derive our knowledge about these women are so sexist and easily distort our view of these women and their accomplishments, the paper also discusses the manner in which their histories come down to us as well as (...) the histories themselves. It discusses in detail the following women: the Pythagorean women philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., Aspasia and Diotima of the 5th century B.C., Arete, Hipparchia, Pamphile and the women Epicureans-all from the 4th century B.C. the five logician daughters of a famous Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century B.C., and finally Hypatia who lived in the 4th century A.D. (shrink)

Known to produce out-of-body states and profound changes in sensory perception, mood, and thought, DMT is a potent short-lasting tryptamine that has experienced growing appeal in the last decade, independent from ayahuasca, the Amazonian visionary brew in which it is an integral ingredient. Investigating user reports available online as well as a variety of other sources consulted in extended cultural research, this article focuses on the “breakthrough” event commonly associated with the DMT trance. The DMT breakthrough event coincides with significant (...) revelatory outcomes associated with perceived contact with “entities” and the transmission of information often in the form of visual language. Examination of the breakthrough event offers insight on the liminal phenomenology of DMT and other tryptamines, a liminality that is given primary expression in reported travels in “hyperspace.” The article examines user reports of DMT “hyperspace” observing a transitional process that, unlike conventional passage rites, is private, individualized, internal, and “ritual like.” As an exploratory discussion of an under-researched phenomenon, the article enters this virtual terrain through a discussion of the gnostic, therapeutic, and recreational modalities of DMT use, before exploring ritual-like modes of transmission and concluding with comments on the ontological significance of the DMT trance. (shrink)

George Bernard Shaw once fancied a dramatic rebuke against the garish religiosity of Lourdes: “I should like to bring a huge procession of atheists and unite myself to Jane Harrison by civil regist...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MASCULINITY AS VIRILITY IN TAHAR BEN JELLOUN'S WORK Lahoucine Ouzgane University ofAlberta To be a woman is a natural infirmity and every woman gets used to it. To be a man is an illusion, an act of violence that requires no justification. (Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child, 70) Inthe last ten to fifteen years, scholarly attention to gender issues in.the Middle East and North Africa has been focused almost (...) exclusively, sometimes obsessively,1 on a quest to understand femininity: what it is and how it is made and regulated—with Muslim women's oppression, the everlasting question of the veil, and the practice of female genital mutilation receiving most of the scrutiny.2 But while this attention—by female and male scholars—to the Muslim woman is indeed a salutary one,3 masculinity in Islamic cultures has so far remained an 1 An international conference on Contemporary Issues in Islamic Studies (to be held in Virginia in November 1996) is soliciting papers in these categories: 1) Islamic Law: Theory and Practice; 2) Fundamentalism; 3) Women in Islam. 2As a parody ofthis preoccupation, Fedwa Malti-Douglas writes: "The Arab woman is a most fascinating creature. Is she veiled? Is she not veiled? Is she oppressed? Is she not oppressed? Were her rights greater before Islam? Are her rights greater after Islam? Does she have a voice? Does she not have a voice?" (3) 3 Some ofthe most significant literature on this subject includes LeilaAhmed's Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a study of the development of Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancientworld to the present, Mamia Lazreg's The Eloquence ofSilence (1994), a detailed analysis ofthe gender relations in Algeria from the precolonial era to the present; The Veil and the Male Elite (more commonly known in French as Le Harempolitique, 1987) by 2 Lahoucine Ouzgane unrecognized and an unacknowledged category that secures its power by refusing to identify itself. There are as yet no studies that make Muslim men visible as gendered subjects and that show that masculinity (like femininity) has a history and clear defining characteristics that are incomprehensible apart from the totality of gender relations in Islamic cultures. In this essay, I wish to consider masculinity as it is depicted in some ofTahar Ben Jelloun's major fiction. With more than twenty novels, two plays, and three poetry collections produced in the last thirty years, Ben Jelloun is undoubtedly the most prolific contemporary francophone North African writer. Though he had earned several important literary awards before, his rise to literary and public prominence began when he became the first African Arab writer to be awarded Le Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for his novel La nuit sacrée published in 1987. Ever since, some of his works have been translated into fifteen languages (Daoud 62) and The SacredNight has recently been made into a film. Some critics have even begun to refer to Ben Jelloun as a future Nobel Prize candidate (Ndiaye 48). I will argue that in a world where the social has taken precedence over the religious, in a world where transcendence has given way to what René Girard describes as "mimetic rivalry,"4 Ben Jelloun's characters are unable to know love as an "experience of transcendence" (Gans). As a consequence they inevitably reduce masculinity to virility, a fragile attribute sustained only through repeated acts of violence. It is indeed possible to read masculinity in such a setting as a set of distinctive practices which emerge from men's positioning within a variety of social structures. In short, masculinity in Ben Jelloun's fiction is perhaps best Fatima Mernissi, an indictment of the way in which numerous Hadiths (or sayings by the prophet) have been manipulated by a male elite to maintain male privileges; Fatna Sabbah's Woman in theMuslim Unconscious(1984), a critique ofthe seemingly contradictory messages which the Islamic legal and erotic discourses imprint on the female body; and Fedwa Malti-Douglas' Woman's Body, Woman's Word (1991), a mapping out of the relationship of woman's voice in Arabo-Islamic discourse to sexuality and the body. 4Central to Girard's thought is... (shrink)

This essay focuses on and attempts to uncover the truly radical character of Nietzsche’s early “philological” work, specifically asking after the benefit he claims the study of classical culture should have for our present, late-modern historical moment. Taking up his study of the Pre-Platonic thinkers in 1873’s Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen , the first section analyzes Nietzsche’s statement that history’s principle task is the uncovering of Persönlichkeiten . I argue that it is not at all the subjective character (...) of a psychologized individual that Nietzsche has in mind, but rather the moment of persönliche Stimmung or ‘being attuned’ to the world, which grounds and gives rise to thinking. In the second section, I show that the phusis or ‘nature’ to which the thinker is exposed in this attunement is comparable to the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces in tragic poetry, as Nietzsche understands it. This dynamic conception of phusis does not provide a metaphysical substrate or an objectively real ground to which we might return via that Greeks, but is rather essentially phenomenal , i.e. it is nothing other than the movement into and out of appearance, which always entails and requires its reception by the human being to whom it appears. In the final section of the essay, this origin proves for Nietzsche not to be located in a distant past moment. Rather, it is the abyssal origin of the tradition that is always already effective in our present moment, informing our contemporary conceptions of our world and ourselves. (shrink)

It is simply no longer acceptable to speak of the goddess Athena from the fifth generation of Olympian/Orphic Greece without reference to her mother Metis. Hesiod, among others, tells us Metis appears as a reincarnation of her first-generation self in the Olympian dynasty as wife of Zeus. She was originally the cosmic egg of all creation in the Orphic Theogony, as recounted by Apollodorus, and Taylor, from whose mucosity, the entire genealogy of the Olympian/Orphic heaven, is spawned. However, from the (...) moment Zeus murdered Metis as she was about to give birth to Athena their daughter, she has lapsed into the fissures of forgetfulness in philosophy, theology, mythology and early psychoanalysis. Indeed, in each field of inquiry, Athena is overwhelmingly deemed ‘unmothered’ and produced as Harrison tells us as a desperate ploy ‘from the brain of Zeus’ through his cunning intellect, for Athena to serve as his ‘mouthpiece’. This paper seeks to do more than simply restore Metis as mother to Athena. It explores the tragedy inherited by her violent removal, for mother/daughter relations, grievability and sustained disavowal of maternal divinity in dominant discourse. (shrink)

The two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, posted by their master's son to guard his ‘sick’ father Philocleon, challenge the audience to guess the nature of the mysterious and strange disease &nuó&sgr&ogr&nu &lambda&lambdaó&kappa&ogr&tau&ogr&nu, 71) on account of which the father must be kept inside the house. When the correct answer to the riddle is finally disclosed, Philocleon is revealed to beis revealed to be φιληλιαστσ , namely a man ‘who loves to be a juror’ and to spend his days in the (...) law-courts passionately pursuing the infatuation of which his son tries to cure him by locking him up away from the law-courts and from his fellow jurors. The joke owes its comic effect to incongruity, termed the ‘humour of inappropriateness’ by MacDowell, who writes: ‘It is funny when addiction to being a juror is called a disease , because “disease” is a word which is not generally applied to such conditions’. It should, however, be stressed that in order to create this sense of incongruity the previously mentioned diseases must form a class with certain common characteristics fundamentally different from those of Philocleon's, thus gradually moulding the audience's expectations and channelling them in a completely different direction. (shrink)

The two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, posted by their master's son to guard his ‘sick’ father Philocleon, challenge the audience to guess the nature of the mysterious and strange disease &nuó&sgr&ogr&nu &lambda&lambdaó&kappa&ogr&tau&ogr&nu, 71) on account of which the father must be kept inside the house. When the correct answer to the riddle is finally disclosed, Philocleon is revealed to beis revealed to be φιληλιαστσ, namely a man ‘who loves to be a juror’ and to spend his days in the law-courts (...) passionately pursuing the infatuation of which his son tries to cure him by locking him up away from the law-courts and from his fellow jurors. The joke owes its comic effect to incongruity, termed the ‘humour of inappropriateness’ by MacDowell, who writes: ‘It is funny when addiction to being a juror is called a disease, because “disease” is a word which is not generally applied to such conditions’. It should, however, be stressed that in order to create this sense of incongruity the previously mentioned diseases must form a class with certain common characteristics fundamentally different from those of Philocleon's, thus gradually moulding the audience's expectations and channelling them in a completely different direction. (shrink)

In the proposed gynecentric aesthetic, which follows the work of Heide Göttner-Abendroth and Alan Lomax, aesthetic activity would function to integrate the individual and society. Intellect, emotion and action would combine to achieve a synthesis of body and spirit. Song and dance would involve the equal expressions of all participants, and aesthetic structures would reflect this egalitarianism. The erotic would be expressed as a vital, positive force, divorced from repression and pornography. The emphasis would be off aesthetic objects to be (...) coveted, hoarded and contemplated, and on dynamic process, fully engaging and socially significant. (shrink)

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the (...) perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries. (shrink)