gender and Judaism in A Serious Man [Coen Bros, 2009], An American Dream [Norman Mailer, 1965] and the Pericope Adulterae.

Carl Schmitt, the author of such books as Political Theology and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, was one of the leading political and legal theorists of the twentieth century. His critical discussions of liberal democratic ideals and institutions continue to arouse controversy, but even his opponents concede his uncanny sense for the basic problems of modern politics. Political Romanticism is a historical study that, like all of Schmitt's major works, offers a fundamental political critique. In it, he defends a concept (...) of political action based on notions of good and evil, justice and injustice, and attacks the political passivity entailed by the romanticization of experience. The book has three strands. The first is an attack on received notions of the origins of the Romantic Movement. Schmitt argues that this movement represents a secularization, subjectification, and privatization in which God is replaced by the emancipated, private individual of the bourgeois social order. The second is an assault on political romanticism that includes a broader attack on the new European bourgeoisie, which Schmitt characterizes as the historical bearer of the movement. The third strand is a defense of political conservatism and a refutation of the view that political romanticism is intrinsically linked with romanticism. Here Schmitt argues that the political romantic is tied not to positions but to aesthetics, and can therefore as easily become a Danton as a Frederick the Great. Guy Oakes's introduction places the book in historical context and also suggests its continuing relevance through his discussion of the latest outcropping of political romanticism in the late 1960s, intriguingly brought out in his example of Norman Mailer as a political romantic. (shrink)

From flea bites to galaxies, from love affairs to shadows, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the sensory and intellectual abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. "This a blessing, not a drawback," he writes. "A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed." This human reduction of experience to a manageable level is the heart of Conquest of Abundance, the book (...) on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994. Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, Conquest of Abundance offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he looks at the ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization. "Paul Feyerabend . . . was the Norman Mailer of philosophy. . . . brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky."—Richard Rorty, New Republic "As much a smudged icon as a philosophical position holder, [Feyerabend] was alluring and erotic, a torch singer for philosophical anarchy."—Nancy Maull, New York Times Book Review "[A] kind of final testament of Feyerabend's thought . . . Conquest of Abundance is as much the product of a brilliant, scintillating style as of an immense erudition and culture. . . . This book is as abundant and rich as the world it envisions."—Arkady Plotnitsky, Chicago Tribune. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper are two views: on the one hand, two general claims about street art – a broad art category encompassing works of spray painting as well as of yarn bombing, paste ups as well as sculptural interventions, tags as well as stickers, and so on – and, on the other hand, a much more specific view about certain contemporary tags produced, roughly, over the past twenty years. The two general claims are, first, that all works (...) of street art are subversive (see, e.g., Bacharach 2015; 2018; Chackal 2016; Baldini 2015; 2016; 2017; 2018; Willard 2016), second, that works of street art are the result of acts of self-expression (Riggle 2016). The specific view about certain contemporary tags is that they are artworks, although they are not presented, mainly, for appreciation of aesthetic properties grounded in their perceptual properties, because they are works of conceptual street art (see Lewisohn 2010; JAK 2012). The key question of the paper concerns, however, not contemporary tags, but “very early tags” (VETs) – a term that I shall use to designate the extremely simple, unadorned tags that first appeared in the late 1960s and that some scholars consider as the historical predecessors of the various practices that today we group under the category “street art” (see, e.g., Young 2014; Gastman et al. 2015): should we regard VETs as artworks? On the one hand, VETs writers tend to answer this question in the negative, since they stress that they didn’t cast themselves as artists and often identify the first tags that are artworks with the graphically elaborated tags that begun to be seen around New York City and Philadelphia just a few years after the appearance of the first tags. On the other hand, already in the early 1970s, artists and intellectuals such as Norman Mailer and Gordon Matta-Clark seemed to hold the view that it was appropriate to regard both VETs and later tags as art, although they didn’t defend this thesis with argument. The view that some contemporary tags that are not presented, mainly, for appreciation of their aesthetic properties might be candidates for appreciation as works of conceptual art suggests a strategy for assessing the issue whether VETs are candidates for art appreciation: can we defend the claim that the extremely simple, unadorned VETs were presented for appreciation as works of conceptual street art? I argue that we have good reasons to hold this view. (shrink)

From flea bites to galaxies, from love affairs to shadows, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the sensory and intellectual abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. "This a blessing, not a drawback," he writes. "A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed." This human reduction of experience to a manageable level is the heart of _Conquest of Abundance_, the book (...) on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994. Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, _Conquest of Abundance_ offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he looks at the ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization. "Paul Feyerabend... was the Norman Mailer of philosophy.... brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky."—Richard Rorty, _New Republic_ "As much a smudged icon as a philosophical position holder, [Feyerabend] was alluring and erotic, a torch singer for philosophical anarchy."—Nancy Maull, _New York Times Book Review_ "[A] kind of final testament of Feyerabend's thought... Conquest of Abundance is as much the product of a brilliant, scintillating style as of an immense erudition and culture.... This book is as abundant and rich as the world it envisions."—Arkady Plotnitsky, _Chicago Tribune_. (shrink)

Europe's leading existential thinkers -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus -- all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less (...) than their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America , historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been fully realized or appreciated. As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers -- from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James -- who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to help articulate the African-American experience its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographer Robert Frank its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s and its lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors , Fight Club and American Beauty . The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to the history of American culture since the end of the Second World War. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 1 See Russell’s exposure of this derogatory contraction of “Viet Nam Cong San” (“Vietnamese Communists”) in his War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 45n. On the importance of language, cf. the legendary remark of Russell’s correspondent, Mohammad Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Russell attempted (...) to enlist Ali on behalf of the iwct (see the ra for their letters of 8 April, 18, 31 May, 11 Sept., 17 Oct., 15 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1967). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 31 (winter 2011–12): 167–87 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL: LONDON, STOCKHOLM AND ROSKILDE Stefan Andersson [email protected] i.wintroduction T he International War Crimes Tribunal (iwct) on the United States’ warfare in Vietnam was founded in 1966 through the moral outrage of the British philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell, his private secretary Ralph Schoenman, Ken Coates, Chris Farley and other people connected to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. They wanted to inform the world about the us government’s attempts to convince the Vietnamese population (who were mainly peasants) that capitalism is a better political-economical system than communism, by killing as many “Vietcong”1 and unarmed seniors, women and children as possible with regular carpet bombing, cluster and phosphorus bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and other illegal weaponry, and oTering the survivors pleasant lodgingsinwired-inhamlets far away from their homes and the graves of their ancestors. This charm oTensive went on for more than ten years, and although three times as many bombs fell on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as were dropped during the whole Second World War, surprisingly enough the Vietnamese were not to be converted. In the 1960s this macabre spectacle could be watched on television all over the world, but very few protested against it. Until 1968 the majority of American January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 168 stefan andersson 2 See Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York, New American Library, 1968). He met up with Noam Chomsky, “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity” (p. 180). Both were arrested and spent a night in prison together. 3 See Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 348. See also Natalie Atkin, “From Margin to Mainstream: American Peace Movements, 1950s– 1970s”, in issue “Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the usa since 1945”, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, no. 32 (2004): 175–92. 4 See May 1970: Birth of the Antiwar University (New York: PathWnder P., 1971). 5 The so-called “Chicago conspiracy trials” or “Chicago 7 trials” that followed, when sevendefendants—AbbieHoTman,JerryRubin,DavidDellinger,TomHayden,Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner—were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot, showed that the us government was not going to tolerate such “unpatriotic” and “criminal ” behaviour. See James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical PaciWsm from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996), pp. 145–51. 6 See Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), and David Caute, 1968: the Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), pp. 3, 7–8, 12z–13. 7 Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963–1964”, PaciWc Historical Review 61 (1992): 69–102. citizens were for the war, although some earlier, well-attended rallies against it, like the 1967 march on the Pentagon in late October,2 might have made some think diTerently. sds (Students for a Democratic Society)3 and other antiwar organizations never became the united force that could challenge the government ’s reliance on what Nixon called the “silent majority”. It was not until the us attacked Cambodia... (shrink)

Just consider, for sheer paranoia, the range of synonyms when the mask is ripped, the silence broken, the deferment brutally concluded: angel-face, arse-bandit, auntie, bent, bessie, bugger, bum-banger, bum boy, chicken, cocksucker, daisie, fag, faggot, fairy, flit, fruit, jasper, mincer; molly, nancy boy, nelly, pansy, patapoof, poofter, cream puff, powder puff, queen, queer, shit-stirrer, sissie, swish, sod, turd-burglar, pervert. For Aristophanes, as for Norman Mailer and Mary Whitehouse, buggery equaled coprophagy: a corrupt, destructive, hypocritical, excremental, urban scatology. Heterosexuality equalled (...) the fecund, rural norm. Aristophanes' diet for a giant dung beetle was turds from a buggered boy: "he says he likes them well kneaded."1To this day degeneracy often seems to be just another code word for homosexuality, as does perversion and decadence; this very essay will seem to many a "decadent" project. Nor would I balk at the term as long as it is interpreted in the French sense: intent on fulfilling Baudelaire's program of transforming the erotically passive to the intellectually active, the voluptuous to rational self-mastery.· 1.Literally, "a hetairekos boy": male prostitute, or boy-friend .Harold Beaver, reader of American literature at the University of Warwick, was recently elected to the new chair of American literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on American literature and is currently completeing a collection of his articles, The Great American Masquerade. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments LITERARY STUDIES AND THE REPRESSION OF REPUTATION by John Rodden 6 6T A Thomakesorbreaks a writer's reputation?" asked Esquire during VV the mid-1960s. The editors' answer, titled "The Structure of the Literary Establishment," came in the form of a multicolored "chart of power." Included was "virtually everyone of serious literary consequence," whether "writer, editor, agent, or simple hipster." The center of power was indicated, noted the (...) editors, by "the hot red blob in the middle," which oozed over the names of the chief literary makers and breakers.1 In 1977 Esquire drove to the heart of the blob, asking a long list of "knowledgeable" writers, academic critics, andjournalists the question, "Which American writers of this century do you consider the most overand under-rated"? Running below the responses across four pages was a sketch of Father Time, busily at work inflating and bursting bubbles bearing the images of various candidates. No consensus was sought, though Dreiser and Willa Cather fared well, and Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Mailer, and Edmund Wilson less well. The editors acknowledged that their respondents generously volunteered a number of nonAmericans too (and stretched "writers of this century" back to the Venerable Bede), "proving that once you get started on this kind of thing, it's hard to know where to stop." 2 Unfortunately, reflection on the matter seems to stop at the doorstep of literary studies. "Reputation" is one of those subjects that readers, 261 262Philosophy and Literature critics, and scholars love to talk about, but to which serious attention is rarely paid, even by sociologists of literature—and not at all by literary critics. Separate disciplines are devoted to the study ofwealth and power, yet none to honor or reputation, the third chiefcategory ofclass systems and human motivation.3 A few cultural critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the "institution of criticism"—book publishing, book reviewing, literaryjournalism, scholarly criticism—has exerted influence on public literary taste or the profession of literary studies. But their work has typically criticized "the culture industry" or "the literary-industrial complex," rather than addressed the making of authors' and books' reputations.4 Although semesterly reading lists and even whole libraries testify to the exalted reputations of a few canonized authors, a near-total silence has prevailed in the academy on reputation as a literary issue in its own right.5 That such a central dynamic of literary life—in a sense the defining, controlling category for an essentially honorific activity like literature and literary criticism—should go virtually unattended by critics of literature might seem at first glance a professional conspiracy by Esquire's "blob." Yet the academy's neglectof"the problem ofreputation" is hardly due to outright professional collusion, but rather to a joint matter of institutional and historical factors. These have partly to do with the elusiveness of "reputation" as a concept, which has accommodated the more important repressive factors: the academy's preoccupation with literary interpretation and its persistent habit of averting its eyes from its own institutional history. This essay explores the problematics of literary reputation, the essence of which consists in our unrefiective tendency to assume that what is valued is invariably what is also reputed. II Few readers would deny that authors' reputations bear heavily on practices in publishing and literary journalism. Few even question Esquire 's buried point that "reputations get made" through institutional networks which exchange and distribute information. Yet the literary academy has traditionally relegated the subject to the slick magazines and, more recendy, to the sociology of art and occupations, where it has received scant attention and where literary canons are not made.6 On those rare occasions when journals like The American Scholar have taken up literary reputation as an issue, they have politely asked only the first of Esquire's questions (about underrated books and authors), John Rodden263 characterizing their discussion as "the game" ofrediscovering "neglected books." 7 Indeed the topic may well strike a bit too close to home, as observers as opposed in their literary politics as Norman Podhoretz and Richard Kostelanetz seem to agree.8 For elite institutions and star reputations exist in academe and in the literary... (shrink)

We all have beliefs, even strong convictions, about what is just and fair in our social arrangements. How should these beliefs and the theories of justice that incorporate them guide our thinking about practical matters of justice? This wide-ranging collection of essays by one of the foremost medical ethicists in the USA explores the claim that justification in ethics, whether of matters of theory or practice, involves achieving coherence between our moral and non-moral beliefs. Amongst the practical issues addressed in (...) the volume are the design of health-care institutions, the distribution of goods between the old and the young, and fairness in hiring and firing. In combining ethical theory and practical ethics this volume will prove especially valuable to philosophers concerned with ethics and applied ethics, political theorists, bioethicists, and others involved in the study of public policy. (shrink)

Kingsley Widmer, one of the most insightful and provocative learned critics, has long had a considerable influence on D. H. Lawrence studies. Here he elaborates the crucial argument that the erotic conversion experience and its dialectic of social negation centrally define Lawrence, thus creating his major legacies. In dialectically considering all of Lawrence’s novels and many of his essays and stories, Widmer carries the issues beyond the texts to Lawrence’s literary and ideological inheritors, including Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. (...) In addition, he imbeds Lawrence’s fictions and roles in the "dark prophecy" of affirmatively countering the Nietzschean tradition and, in a striking chapter on Lady Chatterley’s Lover explores the use of obscenity, sexual ideology, and anticlass utopianism. This is Lawrence as a major dissident culture hero with a still pertinent, drastic revisionism of human responses in a nihilistic world. It is a large and controversial critical view. (shrink)

Healthcare (including public health) is special because it protects normal functioning, which in turn protects the range of opportunities open to individuals. I extend this account in two ways. First, since the distribution of goods other than healthcare affect population health and its distribution, I claim that Rawls's principles of justice describe a fair distribution of the social determinants of health, giving a partial account of when health inequalities are unjust. Second, I supplement a principled account of justice for health (...) and healthcare with an account of fair process for setting limits or rationing care. This account is provided by three conditions that comprise "accountability for reasonableness.". (shrink)

Carl Schmitt, the author of such books as Political Theology and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, was one of the leading political and legal theorists of the twentieth century. His critical discussions of liberal democratic ideals and institutions continue to arouse controversy, but even his opponents concede his uncanny sense for the basic problems of modern politics.Political Romanticism is a historical study that, like all of Schmitt's major works, offers a fundamental political critique. In it, he defends a concept of (...) political action based on notions of good and evil, justice and injustice, and attacks the political passivity entailed by the romanticization of experience.The book has three strands. The first is an attack on received notions of the origins of the Romantic Movement. Schmitt argues that this movement represents a secularization, subjectification, and privatization in which God is replaced by the emancipated, private individual of the bourgeois social order. The second is an assault on political romanticism that includes a broader attack on the new European bourgeoisie, which Schmitt characterizes as the historical bearer of the movement.The third strand is a defense of political conservatism and a refutation of the view that political romanticism is intrinsically linked with romanticism. Here Schmitt argues that the political romantic is tied not to positions but to aesthetics, and can therefore as easily become a Danton as a Frederick the Great.Guy Oakes's introduction places the book in historical context and also suggests its continuing relevance through his discussion of the latest outcropping of political romanticism in the late 1960s, intriguingly brought out in his example of Norman Mailer as a political romantic.Political Romanticism is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

The rapidly increasing numbers of elderly people in our society have raised some important moral questions: How should we distribute social resources among different age groups? What does justice require from both the young and the old? In this book, Norman Daniels offers the first systematic philosophical discussion of these urgent questions, advocating what he calls a "lifespan" approach to the problem: Since, as they age, people pass through a variety of institutions, the challenge of caring for the elderly (...) becomes the prudent allocation of public resources among the various stages of people's lives. Using this philosophical approach, Daniels addresses specific public policy issues such as the allocation of medical funds, the adequacy of long-term care, current Medicare cost-containment measures, and the equitable distribution of income support over the lifespan and between generations. (shrink)

Applied a theory of information integration to decision making with probabilistic events. 10 undergraduates judged the subjective worth of duplex bets that included independent gain and lose components. The worth of each component was assumed to be the product of a subjective weight that reflected the probability of winning or losing, and the subjective worth of the money to be won or lost. The total worth of the bet was the sum of the worths of the 2 components. Thus, each (...) judgment required multiplying and adding operations. The multiplying model worked quite well in 4 experimental conditions. The adding model showed more serious discrepancies, though these were small in magnitude. The theory of functional measurement was applied to scale the subjective values of the probability and money stimuli. Subjective and objective values were nonlinearly related both for probability and for money. (shrink)

My station and its duties : the function of being a manager -- Stockholder management or stakeholder management -- The ethical treatment of employees -- The ethical treatment of customers -- Supply chain management and other issues -- Corporate social responsibility -- Moral imagination, stakeholder theory and systems thinking : one approach to management decision-making -- Leadership.

Most economists are committed to some version of egoism. After distinguishing among the various sorts of egoistic claims, l cite the empirical literature against psychological egoism and show that attempts to account for this data make these economists' previous empirical claims tautological. Moreover, the assumption of egoism has undesirable consequences, especially for students; if people believe that others behave egoistically, they are more likely to behave egoistically themselves. As an alternative to egoism I recommend the commitment model of Robert Frank. (...) The equivalent of egoism at the organizational level is that business firms seek (should seek) to maximize profits. I present arguments to show that a conscious attempt by managers to maximize profits is likely to fail. A committed altruism is more likely to raise profits. I suggest that a firm should take as its primary purpose providing meaningful work for employees. (shrink)

Agency theory involves what is known as the principal-agent problem, a topic widely discussed in economics, management, and business ethics today. It is a characteristic of nearly all modern business firms that the principals (the owners and shareholders) are not the same people as the agents (the managers who run the firms for the principals). This creates situations in which the goals of the principals may not be the same as the agents--the principals will want growth in profits and stock (...) price, while agents may want growth in salaries and positions in the hierarchy. The fourth volume in the Ruffin Series in Business, this book explores the ethical consequences of agency theory through contributions by ethicists, economists, and management theorists. (shrink)

Many societies, and nearly all wealthy, developed countries, provide universal access to a broad range of public health and personal medical services. Is such access to health care a requirement of social justice, or is it simply a matter of social policy that some countries adopt and others do not? If it is a requirement of social justice, we should be clear about what kinds of care we owe people and how we determine what care is owed if we cannot (...) possibly meet every health need, as arguably no society can. We should be clear about what constitutes appropriate access to that care, given that there are diverse barriers to access. We must also be able to say why we owe these things as a matter of justice, and, of course, different accounts of social justice will bake and serve this cake in different ways. (shrink)

How can health plans make fair determinations about when “experimental” (and costly) treatments such as high dose chemotherapy with autologous bone marrow transplantation should be covered despite lack of clear clinical consensus about their benefits? Different models for managing “last chance” therapies evolving in some health plans offer promising examples of how issues of fairness and legitimacy in decisionmaking can be addressed.