In the last twenty years analytic philosophy has seen a rising interest in the philosophy of religion in general and in rational reconstructions of religion related arguments and Christian doctrines. In this short note I like to point to a problem that although cosmological arguments play a great role in the present discussion has not received the attention, I believe, it deserves.[1] An old objection to cosmological arguments, named “the Carriage Objection” by Schopenhauer[2], charges them as being arbitrary: the (...) arguments are employed to carry you to the existence of God, but no further (as the carriage carries you to some destination to be dismissed then, therefore the name of the objection). A simple cosmological argument claims the existence of the universe to require explanation, and offers God as the cause of the universe. The Carriage Objection now asks why the principle of sufficient explanation that carried the argument forth to God will not carry us on to a sufficient explanation of God, and then on – ad infinitum . The regress is considered to be vicious. If one was to accept some brute fact (like the existence of God) then why not stop with the brute fact of the existence of the universe? (shrink)

SUMMARYDebates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from (...) him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest an alternative approach to ethics in social work: virtue ethics. We argue that Habermas's theory of communicative action and discourse ethics needs to be supplemented with virtue ethics to provide an account useful to social work. In these times, sensitivity to others is needed for social work to succeed as a profession interested in combating the complacency, self-interest and lack of compassion evident in cutbacks to social welfare programmes and the resultant concerns with outcomes and (...) efficiencies that have all but obliterated care and compassion. We see in Habermas a furthering of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, most importantly with respect to his focus on emancipatory knowing?the critically reflective knower who knows self as the person doing the knowing. Habermas's distinction between values (objective), ethics (social) and morals (subjective) makes the province of emancipatory knowing (his epistemological theory) consistent with his moral theory?morality is personal. (shrink)

This note critically interrogates the Civil Partnership Act 2004. Through an examination of the legislative background and some of the provisions of the Act, it is argued that civil partnership mirrors a marriage model with some exceptions. In creating this new legal status, the legislation also exacerbates the exclusion of some relationship forms from dominant legal norms. It should be understood as part of an agenda for social inclusion, rather than as radical social change.

“Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 94).

How is love different from lust or infatuation? Do love and marriage really go together “like a horse and carriage”? Does sex have any necessary connection to either? And how important are love, sex, and marriage to a well-lived life? In this lively, lucid, and comprehensive textbook, Raja Halwani pursues the philosophical questions inherent in these three important aspects of human relationships, exploring the nature, uses, and ethics of romantic love, sexuality, and marriage. The book is structured in three (...) parts: _Love_ begins by examining how romantic love differs from other types of love, such as friendship and parental love. It asks which properties of love are essential, whether people have a choice in whom they love, and whether lovers have moral obligations to one another that differ from those they owe to others _Sex_ demonstrates the difficulty in defining sex and the sexual, and examines what constitutes good and bad sex in terms of pleasure, 'naturalness', and moral permissibility. It offers theoretical and applied ethical approaches to a wide range of sexual phenomena _Marriage_ traces the history of the institution, and describes the various forms in which marriage exists and the reasons why people marry. It also surveys accounts of why people should or should not marry, and introduces the main arguments for and against gay marriage. Features include: suggestions for further reading online eResource site with dowloadable discussion questions a clear, jargon-free writing style. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Oedipus Smart?Charles B. DanielsWhat does it amount to, to ask whether Oedipus is smart, intelligent, clever? I take this to mean that he is quicker than most to gain understanding about difficult matters. Now, does Sophocles in Oedipus Rex portray Oedipus to be an intelligent, clever man?The Yes AnswerA "yes" answer to the title question may rest upon three grounds:Y1. Everyone in the play, including Oedipus himself and (...) the citizens of Thebes who have been his subjects for some 15 to 20 years, everyone, that is, save Teiresias, thinks that Oedipus is intelligent.Y2. In both legend and Sophocles' play, the only person smart enough to solve the Sphinx's riddle is Oedipus. Everyone in the play, as well as in the play's audiences, knows that Oedipus has solved the Sphinx's riddle. This is a major reason why everyone in the play, again excepting Teiresias, believes Oedipus to have a first-class mind. Oedipus is renown for this deed and thought by his subjects to be very clever in doing of it.Y3. John P. Carroll, in his interesting study of the extraordinary number of questions posed by Oedipus in Oedipus Rex (one in each nine lines of text uttered by him), concludes, "King Oedipus was endowed at birth with the heritage of the 'riddler's mind,' which by constant use throughout the course of his life he sharpened and brought to greater [End Page 562] perfection than it ever had had in his parents." 1 Oedipus is clever because he has a "riddler's mind": he asks lots of questions.Y1, Y2, and Y3, I believe, constitute the sole evidential textual base for the "yes" response to the title question. 2The No AnswerThe "no" answer, the view that Oedipus is not clever, rests upon four grounds:N1. The first consists of events from Oedipus' past that took place prior to the opening scene of the play and hence do not occur on stage. These are disclosed as the play progresses and its characters relate in dialogue what they believe to have taken place. We discover that Oedipus has lived his entire adult life with unresolved doubts about who his parents are. Worse yet, at the very beginning of his adult life, his inquiry at the Delphic Oracle met with terrible, enigmatic pronouncements that raised the ante on these doubts and made the tenor of his whole subsequent life up to the present worrisome to say the least. We learn of six questions of high moment to Oedipus—questions that touch him as profoundly as did the Sphinx's riddle, "What walks on two, three, and four legs?"—questions which he continues to be aware of and yet has not resolved, or in some cases even probed. A truly clever person, one with a "riddler's mind," would have done so. But the mature Oedipus we meet at the beginning of the play has yet to puzzle out correct answers to the questions:1. Where did the scars on my feet come from?2. Who are my real parents, Polybus and Merope, or some other couple?3. How can I best avoid doing the terrible things the Oracle foretells I shall do—killing my father and marrying my mother—given I am not sure who my father and mother really are?4. Is this old man who has just forced me off the road and arrogantly swatted me from his passing carriage my father?5. Who killed the king whose throne I have just been given?6. Is this widow I am about to marry my mother?The Oedipus we see at the beginning of the play is a man who has solved the riddle of the Sphinx, but has not solved a single one of these six questions from his own past life, which, it turns out, are easily of comparable importance to him. [End Page 563]N2. Another source of evidence in support of a "no" answer consists of failures on Oedipus' part to evince a quick wit concerning two puzzles that arise in the dramatic present among the events we see unfold on stage:7. The riddles... (shrink)

Before there was the digital divide there was the analog divide– and universal service was the attempt to close that analogdivide. Universal service is becoming ever more complex in terms ofregulatory design as it becomes the digital divide. In order to evaluatethe promise of the next generation Internet with respect to the digitaldivide this work looks backwards as well as forwards in time. Byevaluating why previous universal service mechanisms failed andsucceeded this work identifies specific characteristics ofcommunications systems – in particular (...) in billing and managinguncertainty – and argues that these characteristics underliesuccess or failure in terms of technological ubiquity. Developing a setof characteristics of services rather than a set of services is afundamental break with the tradition of universal service. In fact, theimplications of our proposal is that basic characteristics in theoffering of the service rather than the absolute price are critical toclose the digital divide: certainty of total charge, ability to avoiddeposits or disconnection via best effort service, and payer-basedcontrol of all charges. While all of these principles sound obvious infact none of these hold in the telephony network. Universal service hasevolved from common carriage (serve all with no discrimination) to aright to basic services (100% penetration). Universal service isnow discussed as the digital divide, as the access to information asopposed to services becomes increasingly critical. However, we arediscussing in this paper access to the bits and the network rather thanaccess to the information (or intellectual property) once connected. Theprovision of universal service is seen as a technical problem only in thatthe technology costs money – universal service debates have longbeen the domain of economists. Yet the design of protocols has been thedomain of engineers, the building of systems the corporate domain, andthe discussion of equity the interest of ethicists. The design ofprotocols can define the parameters of the corporate decision-makers,the variables of the economist, and the questions for the ethicist. Thedesign decisions made at the fundamental levels can make communicationsequity more or less likely. In this work I focus on the design ofprotocols for the next generation Internet, protocols which willfundamentally change the best-effort nature of Internet services.Building on the economic and ethnographic work of others I argue thatthe effects of protocols adoption on universal service can be predictedto some degree. By examination of past and current technologies Iexamine a set of technical mechanisms to determine how such mechanismsmight harm or enhance universal service. I define each mechanism (e.g.denial of entry) and offer observations about each particularmechanism''s implicit pricing assumptions. I close with a discussion ofinterest to ethicists and regulators on evaluating communicationsprotocols with respect to universal access. Protocols for developingmultiple qualities of service for packet-switched networks have focusedon economic efficiency (e.g. Mackie-Mason, 1995; Choi, Stahl &Winston, 1997; Shapiro & Varian, 1998), billing to encouragewidespread adoption of network innovations (e.g. Xie & Sirbu, 1985)and billing in a manner consistent with the underlying network (e.g.Clark, 1996). Here we examine a set of protocols which include varyingquality of service mechanisms with respect to the compatibility of theprotocols with universal access. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 241-261 [Access article in PDF] Should We All Be More English? Liang Qichao, Rudolf von Jhering, and Rights Stephen C. Angle [T]he Celestial Empire, with its bamboo, the rod for its adult children, and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants, will never attain, in the eyes of foreign nations, the respected position of little Switzerland. The natural disposition of the Swiss (...) in the matter of art and poetry is anything but ideal. It is sober and practical, like that of the Romans. But, in the sense in which I have thus far used the expression "ideal," in its relation to rights, it is just as applicable to the Swiss as to the Englishman. 1Rudolf von Jhering (1818-92) published Der Kampf ums Recht (The Struggle for Law) in 1872. He was already regarded as one of Germany's most important legal philosophers, and Der Kampf helped to ensure a world-wide reputation. His argument that people should be less like the "adult children" of China and more like the English found audiences everywhere, including China, where Der Kampf was translated between 1900 and 1901. Jhering's doctrines stimulated Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of China's leading thinkers, to publish "Lun Quanli Sixiang (On Rights Consciousness)," in 1902 as part of his manifesto On the New People. Liang tells us that the "essential points" of his essay, which is among the earliest and most sustained treatments of the concept of rights to appear in Chinese, are mostly taken from Der Kampf. 2 We will see that there are indeed certain similarities that make Liang's "quanli" 3 (the standard Chinese translation of "rights") resonate with Jhering's notion of "Recht," and these similarities--chief among which is a kind of individual assertiveness--help to explain [End Page 241] Liang's interest in Jhering. My discussion of the two thinkers will offer at least the beginnings of an explanation of why German conceptions of law and rights were so attractive to Chinese intellectuals.As is often the case with cross-cultural comparisons, we will also see that these similarities mask some less obvious but deeply important differences. For Jhering the relation between following the procedures of the law and exercising one's Recht is crucial; for Liang, in contrast, quanli are deeply related to ethical concerns. This difference in turn colors their respective notions of assertiveness, which thus turn out not to resemble one another as closely as first appeared. When we see Recht and quanli as separate concepts emerging from separate discourse contexts, these differences will make sense.In "On Quanli Consciousness" Liang regularly quotes Jhering, often at some length. One important passage reads as follows: In ancient times, Lin Xiangru scolded the King of Qin saying: "Smash both my head and the jade disk!" 4 Now given the size of the state of Zhao, how could such love be expressed for a tiny thing like a jade disk? He was saying that Qin could smash the disk, kill him, invade his territory, endanger his state, and still he would not surrender. Ah! This was nothing other than "quanli"! Jhering has also said: "If an Englishman traveling to the European continent is one day asked to pay an irrational charge by the hotel's carriage driver, in every case he will resolutely scold [the driver]. If the driver won't heed his scolding, the Englishman will struggle for justice without tiring, always preferring to extend his stay; even if his traveling expenses were to increase as much as ten-fold, he would not cease. Unknowing people all laugh at this great fool, but none of them understand that this person's struggle over a few shillings is in fact a vital part of what allows the nation of England to stand tall by itself in the world. This abundance of quanli consciousness and sharpness of feelings of quanli are the great reasons behind the ability of the English to establish their state. Now let... (shrink)

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word (...) for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction. (shrink)

The Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, (...) circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways presence and power of the nonhuman—weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of love—not only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, The Counterhuman Imaginary offers an original repudiation of the centrality of the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture. (shrink)

Back in thirteenth-century Europe, in the early years of the great universities, learning was spiced with the danger of mob violence and a terrifyingly repressive religious censorship. Roger Bacon, a humble and devout English friar, seems an unlikely figure to challenge the orthodoxy of his day - yet he risked his life to establish the basis for true knowledge. Born c.1220, Bacon was passionately interested in the natural world and how things worked. Such dangerous topics were vetoed by his Order, (...) and it was only when a new Pope proved sympathetic that he began compiling his encyclopaedia on everything from optics to alchemy - the synopsis took a year and ran to 800,000 words and he was never to complete the work itself. Sadly, the enlightened Pope died, and Bacon was tried as a magician and incarcerated for ten years. Legend transformed Bacon into a sorcerer, 'Doctor Mirabilis', yet he taught that all magic was based on fraud, and his books were the first flowering of the scientific thinking that would transform our world. He advanced the understanding of optics, made geographical breakthroughs later used by Columbus, predicted everything from horseless carriages to the telescope, and stressed the importance of mathematics to science, a significance ignored for 400 years. His biggest contribution was to insist that a study of the natural world by observation and exact measurement was the surest foundation for truth. Clegg uncovers the realities of life in a medieval university and friary, setting out the shadowy facts of Bacon's life alongside his writings. The result is both a fascinating biography and a picture of the age. (shrink)

Abstract—How do judges decide cases? Are judges controlled by rules, principles and professional standards of reasoning or do they decide as politicians, using the law as an instrument to achieve predetermined goals. In Australia one influential view on this issue was expressed by Sir Owen Dixon when he called for a ‘strict and complete legalism’ for judges. Dixon’s strict legalism no longer commands the respect that it once did and his view is now commonly seen as naïve or as a (...) noble lie intended to hide the freedom open to judges when they decide cases. This article examines first Dixon’s understanding of strict legalism. It will argue that Dixon understood it as a form of practice and not as a rigorous scholarly system. Secondly, it will analyse Wilson v Darling Island Stevedoring to see whether the leading judgment of Fullagar J is in accord with Dixon’s judicial method. In Wilson the High Court was presented with a persistent legal problem—could stevedores claim the benefits of exemption and limitation clauses that commonly featured in bills of lading arising from the transport of goods and people? The third section of the article will consider the obvious belief of many of the judges in the authorities examined that the commercial inconvenience of not protecting stevedores was too great to ignore. These judges were willing to grant stevedores the protection of exemption clauses in contracts of carriage, a trend that continued, indeed accelerated, after Wilson. So, even if Fullagar J did judge as a strict legalist, does this perceived commercial imperative raise doubts about the appropriateness of this style of judging? In conclusion the article will consider the implications of showing that the reasoning in Wilson displayed a fidelity to Dixon’s notion of strict and complete legalism. (shrink)

For Self-Examination and its companion piece Judge for Yourself! are the culmination of Søren Kierkegaard's "second authorship," which followed his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Among the simplest and most readily comprehended of Kierkegaard's books, the two works are part of the signed direct communications, as distinguished from his earlier pseudonymous writings. The lucidity and pithiness, and the earnestness and power, of For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! are enhanced when, as Kierkegaard requested, they are read aloud. They contain the well-known passages (...) on Socrates' defense speech, how to read, the lover's letter, the royal coachman and the carriage team, and the painter's relation to his painting. The aim of awakening and inward deepening is signaled by the opening section on Socrates in For Self-Examination and is pursued in the context of the relations of Christian ideality, grace, and response. The secondary aim, a critique of the established order, links the works to the final polemical writings that appear later after a four-year period of silence. (shrink)

Despite best efforts, every aspect of life is in a state of flux. To adapt is to survive. That is why we must learn to embrace the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence. The essence of impermanence is that reality is never stagnant but is dynamic throughout. The one‐by‐four blue brick with bow that was once associated with the roof of the LEGO Cinderella's Dream Carriage may now be unidentifiable. Skills evolve, experience accumulates, and every LEGO project raises the bar for (...) the next endeavor. When we dismantle it brick by brick, systematically examining each piece, we find that the self, like the Death Star, lacks any substantial permanent essence, that it is bereft of the sum of self. LEGO enthusiasts recognize the MOC (My Own Creation) as a LEGO creation that monks designed and built. Destruction of a mandala, like dismantling LEGO creations, demonstrates that beauty is only meant for this world for a short time. (shrink)

In old age, I seldom keep the books I read, but The Books of Jacob has been shelved next to Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah; my copy of the latter bears an inscription on its flyleaf, “Gift of Jacob Taubes to Tantur, 1978,” which in some way (possibly mystical) authenticates bringing the two books together. It seems I have been waiting for the conjunction since first reading Gerhom Scholem on the Frankists, in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in the (...) carriage of a train waiting to depart from New Street Station, Birmingham, sometime in the mid-1980s. It was a moment of revelation; reading Tokarczuk has been too.A major literary achievement—no question: published in Polish in 2014, Tokarczuk's narrative meditation on the Frankists is a model of what may be done by integrating imagination with documentation. This is how what is loosely termed historical fiction should be written. Terrific when evoking the tastes and smells of Podolia or Smyrna, Tokarczuk is no less profound when expressing the aspirations and hesitations of a Jewish people trapped between two other religions, Islam and Christianity. Like Scholem before her, but in her own, entirely different manner, she brings to center stage movements of the mind that had previously been relegated to the wings. What was once regarded contemptuously as too “other”—other, that is, to post-Enlightenment descriptions of the world, past and present—has been shown by Scholem and now Tokarczuk to be crucial to an understanding of the modern world's genesis. What Scholem did for Sabbatai Sevi, Tokarczuk has done for Jacob Frank—and for his followers as well: those beyond-the-pale Jews who saw in him a savior who was no less anti-messianic than he was the messiah. (shrink)

Upon arriving in Auschwitz Primo Levi discovered that rational discourse, in which actions are done for reasons, was left lying on the carriage floor together with his human dignity. By responding ‘Here one doesn't ask why’, the camp guard succinctly conveys the insight that evil defies reason. This paper examines two studies of evil that are predicated on that idea: Kant's and Augustine's. It argues that their theories share an underlying formation wherein evil remains incomprehensible, except in negative terms (...) as an absence of the reasonable. This deep similarity in the structure of the concept of evil is exceptionally striking if we bear in mind the radical difference in the scope of its application: whereas for Augustine ‘evil’ is a general metaphysical concept that concerns everything that goes wrong in creation, for Kant it is limited to agents and what they do. My argument is that the privative structure which underlies their understanding of evil stems from a shared belief in the central role of rationality in ethical discourse, and in an absolute dependence of moral responsibility on free will. (shrink)

All the time political equality has been feeding on unequality. With the whole world changing into a blossoming democracy we seem to be running out of "unequals” to carry our blessed dream on. We better act before the golden carriage turns into a pumpkin. And why not pay some attention to Greek democracy? How it was born, how it worked, how long it lasted and why it died, leaving us with a dream of ideal perfection. We might learn something (...) useful for our own future. Though the million dollar question is not what are we going to do now that the dream is real, but rather why we seem to be unable to get it out of our minds. (shrink)

Marx as a student -- Karl Marx and humanity : the material of hope -- Man and citizen in Marx -- Changing the world : Marx's Theses on Feuerbach -- Marx and dialectics of idealism -- The university, Marxism, and philosophy -- The Marxist concept of science -- Epicurus and Karl Marx -- Upright carriage, concrete utopia.

For Self-Examination and its companion piece Judge for Yourself! are the culmination of Soren Kierkegaard's "second authorship," which followed his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Among the simplest and most readily comprehended of Kierkegaard's books, the two works are part of the signed direct communications, as distinguished from his earlier pseudonymous writings. The lucidity and pithiness and earnestness and power, of For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! are enhanced when, as Kierkegaard requested, they are read aloud. They contain the well-known passsages on (...) Socrates' defense speech, how to read, the lover's letter, the royal coachman and the carriage team, and the painter's relation to his painting. The aim of awakening and inward deepening is signaled by the opening section on Socrates in For Self-Examination and is pursued in the context of the relations of Christian ideality, grace, and response. The secondary aim, a critique of the established order, links the works to the final polemical writings that appear later after a four-year period of silence. Originally published in 1944. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Many countries have implemented infection control measures directed at carriers of multidrug-resistant organisms. To explore the ethical implications of these measures, we analyzed 227 consultations about multidrug resistance and compared them with the literature on communicable disease in general. We found that control measures aimed at carriers have a range of negative implications. Although moral dilemmas seem similar to those encountered while implementing control measures for other infectious diseases, 4 distinct features stand out for carriage of multidrug-resistant organisms: (...) class='Hi'>carriage presents itself as a state of being; carriage has limited relevance for the health of the carrier; carriage has little relevance outside healthcare settings; and antimicrobial resistance is a slowly evolving threat on which individual carriers have limited effect. These features are of ethical relevance because they influence the way we traditionally think about infectious disease control and urge us to pay more attention to the personal experience of the individual carrier. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the SelfBrian KarafinMeeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. By Anne Carolyn Klein. Boston: Beacon, 1995. 307 pp.“When the iron bird flies and carriages run on wheels, the dharma will come to the land of the red man”: this saying attributed to the semilegendary founder of Buddhism in Tibet, Padmasambhava, stands as (...) an oft-cited marker for the sense that the meeting between Tibetan Buddhism and North American culture was somehow a [End Page 227] fated one, a confluence emergent from some karmic relationship or mythical dependent-arising. Karmic connection or historical product of the near-simultaneous exile of Tibetans from their homeland in 1959 and the burgeoning of Western interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, the encounter of these two mutually and exotically other traditions is, nearing the second Christian millennium, proceeding apace. Especially since the 1989 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans—and now international pop icon—the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Western fascination for things Tibetan has exponentially increased, transforming what had been the preserve of scholars and eccentric spiritual seekers into a media sensation.The reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has proceeded in stages and phases that overlap and mutually affect each other, from pop phantasms of Tibet as a mythical Shangri-La (as in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon) and theosophical hopes in Tibet as the domain of the Wise Mahatmas overseeing the spiritual evolution of humanity to the relatively recent development of Tibetan studies as an academic discipline centered on the translation of texts, as well as the growing population of westerners practicing Tibetan Buddhist religion under the guidance of exiled lamas. With these latter two groups—scholars and practitioners who often overlap memberships—the phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has reached a point where critical self-reflection is now possible. Donald Lopez’ recent Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West is the first full-length critical examination of the cultural confluence I’ve been noticing thus far. Lopez represents a movement in the field of Tibetan studies from philological scholarship of texts, in which the scholarly effort consists largely of translation along with commentary that closely follows the commentarial literature of the Tibetan tradition being translated, to cultural criticism of the underlying dynamics in the encounter itself.This critical self-consciousness in the field of Tibetan studies is likewise the motivating impetus behind Anne Klein’s recent work as represented by the book under review here. Klein, like Lopez, was a student of the dean of American Tibetan studies, Jeffrey Hopkins, at the University of Virginia. As such, her early work followed Hopkins in pursuing an essentially philological approach to Tibetan tradition with a focus on the philosophical scholasticism of the Gelukpa lineage. Klein’s three philological-philosophical books—Knowledge and Liberation; Knowing, Naming, and Negation; and Path to the Middle—are excellent examples of the genre of translation/commentary above mentioned, treating the Sautrantika and Madhyamika tenet systems in which the Gelukpa tradition systematized Indian Buddhist philosophy for the purposes of monastic study and debate. Meeting the Great Bliss Queen is something else entirely; in this work Klein blazes a trail out from recondite translation work toward cultural critique and psychosocial self-reflection in which the previously submerged subtext of the encounter between the Tibetan tradition and the Western psyche and society is allowed to surface and its issues probed and reflected upon.Klein frames her work in terms of a dialogue between Buddhism (by which she mainly means meditation practices and some associated philosophy) and feminism (by which she means both academic feminist theory and her own autobiographical [End Page 228] experience as a Western woman personally experiencing the confluence of Western and Tibetan exigencies). Klein is a salient example of a scholar-practitioner, someone who occupies positions both in the academic field of Tibetan studies and in the population of students of Tibetan lamas in exile. As such, she is exactly situated to embark on such a project of cultural and psychological reflection. She knows... (shrink)

Sartre's evocation of ideological socialism in Dirty Hands ' protagonist Hugo, as opposed to the pragmatism of the realist, Hoederer, found an attentive audience in April 1948. The means are justified by the ends, Hoederer insists, although that means “getting one's hands dirty.“ Eighteen months later, Camus produced Les Justes , which offers an implicit rebuttal of Sartre's position. Kaliayev-like Hugo, an idealist and an intellectual-is rebuked by his hard-line colleague, Fedorov, for failing to throw his grenade at the Archduke's (...) carriage merely because he was accompanied by children. Kaliayev's vindication of the individual's moral conscience, even in the midst of collective action, counters Hoederer's position. For Camus, the ends do not necessarily justify the means; there are always lines to be drawn in the name of an ethical stance which, ultimately, protects human dignity from the allure of morally compromised “progress.“ Consideration of each playwright's notion of authenticity, as embodied in their respective protagonists, leads us to consider whether Sartre had, in effect, anticipated Kaliayev in the person of Hugo and foreshadowed his critique of Camus's L'Homme révolté, which led to their definitive quarrel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:398 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Becky Thompson In the Slip Between Coasts Every morning the sea announces the day intimate crashing against the high stone wall we scan the waves for black dots floating becoming new moons and then arms waving rafts carrying the world Cartography in Greece after Zeina Hashem Beck’s “To Hamra” Here is the Oleander bush where a family (...) hid before their walk up the hill from Eftalou to Molyvos after eating eggs and croissants in my seaside room thirteen pairs of shoes lined up on the patio slate Here is seaweed beach where one raft landed in perched sea another behind carrying the elders and children Becky Thompson 399 stalled, taking in saltwater coast guard delayed in Petra sea ten, twenty, fifty minutes shouting and prayer finally a rescue exhaustion lining every pore They say memories fade, mine multiply, a cacophony tossing Here is the beach where the Syrian man strapping muscles and whimsical eyes gave me his salmon shirt with a finely made collar his friends ordered selfies called home saying yes began the climb to Mytilini defiant, alive There were moments of freedom jubilation in the air rest on the beach with dates and cool water children tossing stones into the sea lovers sitting close, feet in Europe cell phones that worked, telegraphing safety What does it mean to miss the intimacy of disaster? Now rescue teams mechanic pick-ups intercept rafts before shore whisk people away to Skala Sikamia then Moria no time to touch sand rest with the breeze Here is life jacket graveyard next to the dump perched between two hills above the seacoast 400 Becky Thompson a German couple toots up on a scooter taking photographs while eating nine-grain toast academics from the US talking postmodern flight a film crew from Barcelona picking through jackets amid ashes and twisted plastic crows memorize the wind as two garbage trucks trudge up the road bringing old fish and more jackets I wave at the sheepherder as I walk down the hill Save the people, bury the dead, photograph the remains, repeat Here is the hotel by the beach in Petra where children would run to the iron swing set let the arc carry them then jump off dance in the sprinklers the owner emerging mumbling generations handing us apricots and bottles of water Here is the computer store where the young Greek tells me he can’t copy my poems since he sees Arabic words menacing the page Here is my patience as I sit in his smoke ask him about his family and dancing Becky Thompson 401 eye his automatic weapon perched next to a wooden door Down the highway is a new bar next to Moria. Of course. Here is barbed wire that doubles as a fence a clothesline for diapers space to toss out rotten food Here is the highway lined with pickups and two-door sedans young Greek employment guarding people in tents Here is a baby carriage a young mother pushes that seconds as a grocery cart and shade for her five-year-old a step up from before when babies were in arms toddlers walking Here is the refugee people center where they built a strong swing set men lifting weights growing rings around their arms women stretching out in a new room eyeing the Lesvos sky Here are the streets of Mytilini looking like Beirut the Greeks who ran from Turkey the Turks who kicked out Afghans the Afghans who wish they were Syrian 402 Becky Thompson Syrians joined by Congolese— teachers, holy seers, and men selling hats. The sidewalk sparkles an atlas in transit.... (shrink)

Drug‐resistant bacterial infections constitute a major threat to global public health. Several key bacteria that are becoming increasingly resistant are among those that are ubiquitously carried by human beings and usually cause no symptoms (i.e. individuals are asymptomatic carriers) until and/or unless a precipitating event leads to symptomatic infection (and thus disease). Carriers of drug‐resistant bacteria can also transmit resistant pathogens to others, thus putting the latter at risk of resistant infections. Accumulating evidence suggests that such transmission occurs not only (...) in hospital settings but also in the general community, although considerably more data are needed to assess the extent of this problem. Asymptomatic carriage of drug‐resistant bacteria raises important ethical questions regarding the appropriate public health response, including the degree to which it would be justified to impose burdens on asymptomatic carriers (and others) in order to prevent transmission. In this paper, we (i) summarize current evidence regarding the carriage of key drug‐resistant bacteria, noting important knowledge gaps; and (ii) explore the particular implications of existing public health ethics frameworks for policy‐making regarding asymptomatic carriers. Inter alia, we argue that the relative burdens imposed by public health measures on healthy carriers (as opposed to sick individuals) warrant careful consideration and should be proportionate to the expected public health benefits in terms of risks averted. We conclude that more surveillance and research regarding community transmission will be needed in order to clarify relevant risks and design proportionate policies, although extensive community surveillance itself would also require careful ethical consideration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for his (...) studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

Modern, Stevie In a dark uniform, she walks swiftly through the tram carriage, her movements machine-like and efficient. Wordlessly, she punches passengers' tickets and passes money from the coin-changer strapped to her hip. The passengers pay small attention, their gazes vaguely forward. They do not see the face of evil, the anonymous official who stands above them returning their ticket stub. The tram clatters on through Berlin's streets.

Begining from the Paleolithic Period cultures, the Danube has hosted a society and a state. The Danube river, which is the source of life for the states living in the Danube basin, has become more strategic with the growth and spread of the states and has become the key to existence in these lands. The Danube, which was used only for drinking water and agricultural irrigation in the Middle Ages, has become the main tool of trade in time. It has (...) been replaced by modern boats, starting with the transportation made by backing up from the shore with horse-drawn carriages over the Danube. The process of sharing dominance in the waterway has been the main target in the management of the Danube. It is possible to evaluate the process of managing the navigation in the Danube in four periods. The first period is the period of bilateral agreements between 1792 and before; the second term, the commission period, which started with the Paris Peace Conference of 1856 and continued between the 1920s and the First World War, which was planned for a short time but whose mandate was extended several times; the third period, efforts to internationalize the Danube from 1920 to the Second World War; the fourth period is the internationalization process of the Danube. However, there is no legal document in which the Danube states, which have agreed for the management of navigation for centuries, have made an agreement on the prevention, control and disposal of ship-borne pollution. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Timeless wisdom on death and dying from the celebrated Stoic philosopher Seneca "It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die," wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. He counseled readers to "study death always," and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated (...) by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker and dazzling writer who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out. Seneca believed that life is only a journey toward death and that one must rehearse for death throughout life. Here, he tells us how to practice for death, how to die well, and how to understand the role of a good death in a good life. He stresses the universality of death, its importance as life's final rite of passage, and its ability to liberate us from pain, slavery, or political oppression. Featuring beautifully rendered new translations, How to Die also includes an enlightening introduction, notes, the original Latin texts, and an epilogue presenting Tacitus's description of Seneca's grim suicide. (shrink)

Eternity Lies Beneath: Autonomy and Finitude in Kierkegaard's Early Writings VANESSA RUMBLE AMONG the extant descriptions of Kierkegaard by his contemporaries, one particularly vivid portrait captures the reflections of the young theologian on a carriage ride through his beloved Deer Park: The road was so little travelled that it looked in places almost overgrown with grass. There was absolutely no dust .... On either side there were new leaves on the beech trees .... Uncle Peter [Christian Kierkegaard, SCren's eldest (...) brother] had surely said some- thing about how Danish this sort of weather was -- or even that it was Scandinavian: it was so light and so bright and so fine; there was no wilderness or heath; it was almost childlike in its purity. But the younger brother [SCren] had replied that such weather was perfectly suited to conceal the Eternal. It was a temptation -- he had said that many times -- it tempted the mind to dream and to wander. Who could keep hold of a serious thought while enjoying that smooth, billowing grass? Either one had to let one's mind billow and dream like the grass or one had to surrender to one's thoughts, but in that case all this bright, transient lushness became painful. The whole thing was a quaking bog, he had said. Of course it looked as if that green, open plain was solid ground, but the entire thing was a bog, you know. It quaked and quaked, and Eternity lay beneath. He couldn't imagine how his brother could want.. (shrink)

Berkeley’s immaterialism depends on a correct answer to the question whether, in experiencing what is described as hearing a coach in the street, a perceiving subject really only immediately perceives certain sounds, auditory sensible ideas that are partly constitutive of the carriage as a sensible thing, or in immediately experiencing the associated sounds immediately perceives the carriage itself. Much hangs on how the word ‘perceive’ is thought to be propery used, and how wide and deeply penetrating its intentionality (...) is conceived to be, whether we can perceive sensible things like carriages or only carriagey sensible ideas. There are problems with answers on both sides of the inevitable opposition, and hence a number of related dilemmas running through and sometimes across one another in this part of Berkeley’s philosophy. The coach and horse argument in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues affirms radical phenomenalism as the strictly philosophically correct thesis that all perceiving is immediately perceiving sensible ideas, to the exclusion of sensible things as total congeries of sensible ideas. Relevant passages in Berkeley’s text set in an interpretative framework and proper context of philosophical exchange between Berkeley’s dialogue partners reveals the carriage argument as more subtle in structure and more powerfully supportive of a radical idealist phenomenalism in Berkeley’s empiricist epistemology than is exemplified elsewhere in Three Dialogues. (shrink)

This article tries to provide elements of discussion and reflection rather than answers to the following question: for many centuries or even millennia, man, at least in so far as prehistory and history have recorded it, made a close connection between the beautiful, the true and the useful and he sought an aesthetic response in the minute manifestations of his daily existence as well as of his intellectual life. Today, and even more so for just the past fifty or one (...) hundred years, art seems to be relegated to specific domains, expelled from the daily life of the average person. Yesterday, and for centuries and millennia, mankind was not satisfied with the fact that a house, a temple, a church, a fortification or a castle were lodgings, proper places to hold reunions, strong-holds built for a particular purpose, it was equally important that they be beautiful; a key did not only have to open a lock, a carriage had not only to run, a bit to control a horse, spurs to reassure the rider, a glass pane to close a window, a table to have a place setting, a chest of drawers to contain clothes, clothes to cover the body, a pen to write, a manuscript to transmit the signs of the alphabet—no, it was also necessary that these signs, that manuscript, the pen, the spurs, the bit, the key … be designed and decorated in such a way so as to evoke in the persons who merely saw them, without even using them, an affective emotion of beauty. Nor was it enough that science or a technique be true or useful, they had also to be beautiful. (shrink)

Within the context of the insurable interest in cargo insurance contracts, in this publication the writer analyses the theoretical aspects of the insurable interest and the relevant laws. Dealing with the problems of determining the insurable interest in cargo insurance contracts the writer has examined the possible options of insurance of the cargo in transit, and while analysing the law governing transport and the sale of goods he examines a person‘s insurable interest in the cargo insured and legal remedies to (...) protect such an interest by concluding a cargo insurance contract. The writer believes that the legal regulation of the insurable interest in Lithuania, interpreting the insurable interest as a loss sustained by a policyholder, the insured or the beneficiary upon an event insured against, fails to guarantee the protection of proprietary and economic interests of persons engaged in the circulation of commodities. Laws governing cargo insurance contracts in Lithuania do not provide a flexible protection of interests of the participants in trade operations and impedes the development of trade and transit, therefore the legal regulation of cargo insurance, especially of the insurable interest should be improved. (shrink)