This article considers how markers of place function differently in the print book ecosystem vs. the ebook ecosystem, using books associated with Australia and Western Australia as a case study. Although book historians have mostly failed to engage with ebooks as subject matter, they have considered in some detail the way in which markers of place function in the print book ecosystem. By surveying the scholarly output of book historians working with mapping technologies, it is possible to conclude that, in (...) the print book ecosystem, there exist a handful of markers identifying the following categories: places associated with a book’s setting, its author, its publication, its purchase, and its marketing and publicity. The latter three markers look substantially different in the ebook ecosystem than in the print book ecosystem. Furthermore, in the ebook ecosystem, changes to these three markers can mediate setting and author as markers of place. (shrink)

This chapter talks about the power of music, how characters in South Park use it in telling stories, and how music conveys ideas in the context of Western philosophy. But South Park does raise questions about music that philosophers— particularly Plato—have dealt with again and again. Despite their flaws, these Greek thinkers' views were instrumental to asking questions about music's impact (often referred to as ethos), its mathematical properties in relation to the universe, and how these two aspects interact with (...) one another. Phil Collins and Asia may not survive history's merciless aesthetic filter, just as the aulos instrument vanished long ago, but where the underlying philosophy is concerned, the issues are timeless. (shrink)

Decentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in (...) the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices. (shrink)

A History of Modern Psychology provides students with an engaging, comprehensive, and global history of psychological science, from the birth of the field to the present. It examines the attempts to establish psychology as a science in several countries and epochs. The text expertly draws on a vast knowledge of the field in the United States, England, Germany, France, Russia, and Scandinavia, as well as on author Per Saugstad's keen study of neighboring sciences, including physiology, evolutionary biology, psychiatry, (...) and neurology. Offering a unique global perspective on the development of psychology as an empirical science, this text is an ideal introduction to the field for students and other readers interested in the history of modern psychology. (shrink)

In this article two problems with the recently developed "practice or virtue approach" to business ethics are discussed. The first problem concerns an alleged harmony between common demands of morality (generally understood) and the internal goods of actual business practice. The claimed harmony is strong in essence since it holds that the role expectations a good manager has to live up to, do in fact coincide with what morality demands. The second problem is related to the first and concerns the (...) alleged relevance of a virtue perspective for business ethics. According to the virtue perspective discussed in this article, moral reasoning should take actual practice, and only actual practice, as a point of departure. In so doing ethics is claimed to become insulated from e.g. putting irrelevant demands on practitioners. Such demands are understood as based on abstract principles alien to the practice in question. The thesis of this article is that neither of the above mentioned two claims are plausible. This is so basically because one needs to turn elsewhere than to actual business practice in order to detect a morally laden notion of managerial goodness. (shrink)

Some fictions deliberately omit all fictional statements about the mental functioning of fictional agents. This presents an interpretive dilemma, as when we read fiction we ought to reconstruct the fictional minds of characters significant to the plot. Fictions that present the reader with an opaque fictional mind resist the general imaginative project prescribed by fiction-making and seem to demand a novel approach to imagining their fictional entities. Such fictional entities demand the reader commit to one of at least (...) two different ways of imagining nothing about a fictional mind, without explicitly authorizing either. One approach has already been described by H. Porter Abbott. Another can be extracted from Simone De Beauvoir, whose ethics of ambiguity is well suited to dealing with fictional entities about which nothing is fixed nor determined. (shrink)

Since Varian (Econometrica 50:945–973, 1982; Review of Economic Studies 50:90–110, 1983) made checking for consistency with revealed preference conditions more accessible to empirical researchers; researchers have often used revealed preference procedures to test their maintained hypotheses and narrow the scope of their demand studies. The tests developed by Varian are for the direct utility function, while researchers estimating demand systems often find it convenient to model consumer behavior with an indirect utility function. Unfortunately structure revealed in the direct (...) utility function does not necessarily follow for the indirect utility function. To remedy this problem, we set forth conditions for checking consumer data for consistency with revealed preference conditions for minimization and weak separability of the indirect utility function. (shrink)

A. N. Prior’s writings should obviously be studied already for historical reasons. His inventions of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic are clearly important events in the history of logic. But the enduring importance of studying his works also rests on his methodological approach, which remains highly relevant also for systematical reasons. In this paper we argue that Prior’s formulation in the 1950s of a tense-logical paradigm for the study of time should be understood in the light of at (...) least three other principles or perspectives which were manifest already in his studies during the 1940s and further developed in the 1950s: his emphasis on the value of interdisciplinary studies, his reflections on formalisation and his view of the role of symbolic logic in conceptual studies and in the philosophy of science. Our investigation into Prior’s basic tenets and principles makes extensive use of Prior’s Nachlass. It is thereby also exemplified how his correspondence and unpublished papers contain important information for a deeper understanding of Prior’s paradigm for the study of time. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the history of the concept of “Bildung” from its origin in the philosophy of Enlightenment to the crisis of education in the middle of the 20th century. After a presentation of the rise of the concept in the 18th and 19th century, the article discusses Horkheimer and Adornos critique of the classical tradition of Bildung and their diagnosis of the intellectual and educational climate in Th e Western World after the 2nd World War. Following this it (...) presents the even more pessimistic view of the Austrian philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann, who in his book Theorie der Unbildung from 2008 claims that the concept of “Bildung” today has no longer any normative impact on the theory and practice of education. In the final section I second this view by claiming that the tradition of Bildung is now closed: What is left of it is its history. (shrink)

When K. Grue-Sørensen became a professor of pedagogy at the University of Copenhagen in 1955, he was inline with the dominant historical-hermeneutical approach to humanities. From the late 1960s until retirementin 1974, his approach was challenged by both technical and critical alternatives. Both these alternative havesince grown steadily, while the historical-hermeneutical view has been in the defensive. But Grue-Sørensenand the tradition he represented have three signifi cant points for today’s pedagogy, whether it is technicalor critical: pedagogy can and should not (...) deliver effi ciency technology, pedagogy should as far as possible useeveryday language, and fi nally that the educational history can make us wiser. (shrink)

Value-freedom or value-neutrality is a well-known topic in the philosophy of science. But what about the value-neutrality of technology, medical or other? Is it too far-fetched to imagine technology as in some sense value-neutral — in view of its intimate connection with purposeful human action? No; unexpected perhaps, but less far-fetched than expected. If we try to conceive of technology as a cognitive possibility abstracted from each and every specific social context, we shall find (at least) three senses in which (...) it may be regarded as value-neutral: (1) neutral vis-à-vis different possible uses and ends; (2) neutral before action; (3) neutral qua cognitive object, analogous to the cognitive core of science. The further meanings and implications of these three senses of value-neutrality are discussed.What is this exercise good for? The nature of technology is indeed worth pondering in its own right, not least from this rather unusual angle. But beyond that: as the possible meanings of value-neutrality are tried out, the radical nature of human responsibility for the social implementation of technology will be highlighted. (shrink)

Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence deals with the history of temporal logic as well as the crucial systematic questions within the field. The book studies the rich contributions from ancient and medieval philosophy up to the downfall of temporal logic in the Renaissance. The modern rediscovery of the subject, which is especially due to the work of A. N. Prior, is described, leading into a thorough discussion of the use of temporal logic in computer science and (...) the understanding of natural language. Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence thus interweaves linguistic, philosophical and computational aspects into an informative and inspiring whole. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethical aspects of medically-induced sedation and pain relief in intensive care medicine. The study results reported are part of a larger investigation of patients’ experiences of being sedated and receiving pain relief, and also families’ experiences of having a close relative under controlled sedation in an intensive care unit. The study is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with nine nurses and six doctors working in intensive care and surgical units in a major Norwegian hospital. The (...) textual data are interpreted according to Kvale’s method for analyzing qualitative data. There are ethical problems regarding how to achieve an acceptable balance between a patient’s subjective well-being and the medical need for reduced sedation. The authors discuss whether some medical reasons for reduced sedation are ethically justifiable, given the actual medical knowledge available. The study also addresses the ethical consequences of reducing medically-induced sedation and the demands it puts on interdisciplinary co-operation and communication, as well as the importance of improving the quality of medical and nursing care. (shrink)

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history--the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process--in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding (...) of modernity in general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

This paper explores the laborious and intimate work of turning bodies of research animals into models of human patients. Based on ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary Danish research centre NEOMUNE, we investigate collaboration across species and disciplines, in research aiming at improving survival for preterm infants. NEOMUNE experimental studies on piglets evolved as a platform on which both basic and clinical scientists exercised professional authority. Guided by the field of multi-species research, we explore the social and material agency of research (...) animals in the production of human health. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “collaborative survival”, we show that sharing the responsibility of the life and death of up to twenty-five preterm piglets fostered not only a collegial solidarity between basic and clinical scientists, but also a transformative cross-fertilization across species and disciplines—a productive “contamination”—facilitating the day-to-day survival of piglets, the academic survival of scientists and the promise of survival of preterm infants. Contamination spurred intertwined identity shifts that increased the porosity between the pig laboratory and the neonatal intensive care unit. Of particular significance was the ability of the research piglets to flexibly become animal-infant-patient hybrids in need of a united effort from basic and clinical researchers. However, ‘hybrid pigs’ also entailed a threat to the demarcation between humans and animals that consolidates the use of animals in biomedical research, and efforts were continuously done to keep contamination within spatial limits. We conclude that contamination facilitates transformative encounters, yet needs spatial containment to materialize bench-to-bedside translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 43-56 [Access article in PDF] Jack London's Medusa of Truth Per Serritslev Petersen FROM THE VERY START of his literary career, Jack London believed that a good fiction writer must also be a good thinker—that fictional authenticity and integrity must somehow be imbedded in philosophical authenticity and integrity. In his early essay "On the Writer's Philosophy of Life," and in his early letters to (...) Cloudsley Johns, his intellectually "slovenly" friend (who also happened to share his literary ambitions and interests), London insists, again and again, on the proper philosophical foundation of the successful writer. This is how poor Cloudsley, who had previously been told to "get in and systematically ground [himself] in history, economics, biology and the kindred branches" 1 gets browbeaten by his self-appointed mentor and master, a veritable Jack of all trades, in a letter dated March 15, 1900: "To be well fitted for the tragedy of existence (intellectual existence), one must have a working philosophy, a synthesis of things. Have you a synthesis of things? Do you write, and talk, and build upon a foundation which you know is securely laid? Or do you not rather build with a hazy idea of 'to hell with the foundation.'" London then proceeds to catechize his friend on scientific principles such as the indestructibility of Matter, the persistence of Force, and the overall "dynamic principle, true of the metamorphosis of the universe"—principles that Cloudsley is urged to study "carefully and painstakingly" before he can ever claim to have "a firm foundation for [his] philosophy of life" (Letters, pp. 170-71).In London's admittedly heavy-handed ad hominem argument, one recognizes the philosophical sledgehammer of Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary hero of The Iron Heel and one of the fictional exponents of "that cold forbidding philosophy, materialistic monism," 2 which also [End Page 43] served as the scientific foundation of London's own philosophy of life. There are, however, not one, but two components to London's philosophy, which, as I shall argue in this essay, together constitute an essentially dialectical construction, a dynamic juxtaposition of and negotiation with, on the one hand, the "cold forbidding" Medusa of Truth and, on the other hand, the life-enhancing Aphrodite of Romance, the second of which is one of several versions of the vital Maia-Lie (Maia being the Buddhist term for the power that creates or re-creates the world as cosmic illusion).Two points need to be stressed from the outset. First, London's work is implicitly aligned with literary naturalism—the "Zolaistic Movement" of modern American fiction that the genteel writer and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich famously condemned for its "miasmatic breath" 3 —even though London himself would always qualify his own naturalism by insisting that, artistically, he was "an emotional materialist" (Letters, p. 329), and that his realism was, in the words of Martin Eden, one of his fictional alter egos, "an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith." 4 Second, London's work is explicitly aligned with philosophical naturalism (as distinct from supernaturalism)—that is, naturalism as the philosophical or epistemological view that, to quote The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), "everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world." In philosophical practice, naturalism and materialism have tended to coalesce, materialism being basically understood as the view that everything is made of matter, which can be studied by the methods of natural science. Like London's philosophical alter ego Ernest Everhard (and also like fictional protagonists such as Wolf Larsen and Martin Eden), London declared himself "a materialistic monist," although, as he admitted to Cloudsley Johns, "there is dam little satisfaction in it." Rhetorically impersonating, as it were, Wolf Larsen, London, in the same letter, asks himself and his correspondent, "what squirming anywhere, damned or otherwise, means anything? That's the question I am always prone to put: What's this chemical ferment called life about? Small wonder that small men... (shrink)

Gadow's understanding of nursing as a relational narrative anchored in a dialectic between the fundamental subjectivity of the individual client and the objectification of his illness poses some interesting questions for nursing ethics and care. For Gadow, nursing is an encounter with the immediate vulnerability of the client and also lends it responsibilities to the medical objectification of illness aiming at disease treatment and control. Hence, nursing agency is divided between its responsibilities induced by the personal vulnerability of the patient (...) and the more impersonal, but benevolent intention shaped by medical knowledge. Medical knowledge is impersonal in the sense that it is knowledge detached from the subjectivity of the patient. But how is nursing able to reconcile the interests derived from personal and experienced vulnerability with the more impersonal and often conflicting demands of medical knowledge? This question is even more intriguing because there seems to be an objective dimension within a patient's subjectivity itself: an autonomous person can critically evaluate his own subjectivity as a basis for informed self‐interest. The sick person is thus confronted with objectivity on two important levels: the objective facts of his disease and his detachment from his own experiential vulnerability when engaged in the critical evaluation of his self‐interest. This paper will discuss the normative dimensions of these complex and, frequently, conflicting perspectives from the theoretical perspectives of Thomas Nagel's normative responsibility and Sally Gadow's clinical epistemology and relational narratives. The empirical basis for the discussion will be an ongoing study of the ethical dimensions of pain relief and sedation in an intensive care unit. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have long tried to understand people's irrational behaviour through concepts such as weakness of will, compulsion and addiction. The scientific basis of the project has been greatly enhanced by advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, some philosophers have also been critical of the more general conclusions drawn by the scientists. This is especially true when scientific researchers start making claims that go to philosophical issues, such as free will and responsibility. Conversely, some scientists have been critical (...) of philosophical approaches for not understanding the results of recent research. I examined some of the recent history of scientific claims about addiction, and the rise of the claims from scientists to have shown that addiction is a brain disease and that addictive behaviour is compulsive. Given the well-confirmed evidence that addicts can modulate their behaviour in response to rewards, punishments and context, it is clear that according to normal definitions of compulsivity the behaviour of addicts is not typically compulsive, suggesting that neuroscientists are making an error in their interpretation of data. Since philosophers have expertise in making distinctions between different kinds of action and categorising them as free, weak-willed and compulsive, we will achieve a better interpretation of the neuroscience of addiction when taking this philosophical work into account. Conversely, given the status of science in the modern world, philosophers have to grapple with the latest neuroscientific discoveries and show the compatibility of their philosophical theories with the data for their approaches to maintain credibility. (shrink)

Die Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen gehort derzeit zu den dynamischsten und innovativsten Feldern der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine historische Teildisziplin, die lange Zeit als eher traditionell und konservativ galt, erweitert und erneuert sich. Diesen Prozess dokumentieren die Beitrage des vorliegenden Bandes. Sie leisten eine Bestandsaufnahme, entwickeln Perspektiven und reflektieren so die ganze Bandbreite einer modernen Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen. Gepragt ist der Band durch den Dialog von Historikern, die sich mit unterschiedlicher Ausrichtung - politik-, wirtschafts-, sozial- oder kulturgeschichtlich - fur internationale (...) Geschichte interessieren. Das Spektrum der Beitrage reicht von der Erforschung von Globalisierungsprozessen uber Fragen des Kulturtransfers bis hin zu einer internationalen Politikgeschichte. (shrink)

This article investigates whether geoengineering can be justified as a residual obligation given that demands related to mitigating emissions of greenhouse gases are left unfulfilled due to conflicting with other demands. Ultimately, it is found that geoengineering cannot be justified due to, amongst other reasons, risks.

Arthur Norman Prior (1914-69) was a logician and philosopher from New Zealand who contributed crucially to the development of ‘non-standard’ logics, especially of the modal variety. His greatest achievement was the invention of modern temporal logic, worked out in close connection with modal logic. However, his work in logic had a much broader scope. He was also the founder of hybrid logic, and he made important contributions to deontic logic, modal logic, the theory of quantification, the nature of propositions and (...) the history of logic. In addition, he discussed questions of ethics, free will, and general theology. Prior’s philosophical works comprise about 200 titles. His earliest articles center on philosophical theology and historical studies of Scottish Reformed Theology. This led on to the publication of his first influential work on ethics: Logic and The Basis of Ethics (1949). With the invention of tense-logic in the early 1950s, his focus shifted to investigations into the syntax of tempo-modal logic leading to his seminal Time and Modality (1957), a volume derived from his John Locke Lectures in Oxford in 1956. Furthermore Prior, together with the Irish mathematician and logician C.A. Meredith (1904-76), made important early contributions to the semantics of possible worlds. Prior’s tense-logic provided a strong conceptual framework for problems pertaining to the philosophy of time. In Time and Modality, Prior discussed the philosophical implications of Ruth Barcan’s famous formulae for tense-logic, and in the 1960s he worked on the notion of the present. The most persistent problem running through Prior’s work is his study of the questions surrounding human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and more general philosophical problems emerging from this classical theological question. His thorough analysis of this problem, with the conceptual tools of tense-logic, received a crucial impetus from his correspondence with the young Saul Kripke, when the latter suggested the semantic tool of branching time to Prior. Prior’s development of two solutions based on branching time for the problem of future contingency, the Peircean and the Ockham solution, was most thoroughly developed in Past, Present and Future (1967), the most important work published by Prior. Characteristically for Prior’s methodological approach, the development of these two solutions were at the same time a development of two new systems of tense logic, and vice versa. One of Prior’s significant contributions to logic was his work on world propositions and instant propositions. In the course of developing these notions he also made one of the earliest formulations of hybrid logic. In Papers on Time and Tense (1968), he presented this idea in a more detailed manner in the context of his four grades of tense-logical involvement. (shrink)

Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence deals with the history of temporal logic as well as the crucial systematic questions within the field. The book studies the rich contributions from ancient and medieval philosophy up to the downfall of temporal logic in the Renaissance. The modern rediscovery of the subject, which is especially due to the work of A. N. Prior, is described, leading into a thorough discussion of the use of temporal logic in computer science and (...) the understanding of natural language. Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence thus interweaves linguistic, philosophical and computational aspects into an informative and inspiring whole. (shrink)

In his Analytical Philosophy of History A. C. Danto suggests that the main difference between an Ideal Chronicle (i.e. an account of events that is contemporaneous and exhaustive) and a History is that the Chronicle cannot by its nature treat adequately the significance of the events it describes. For, Danto claims, events derive significance from their relations with other events, including those that are future to themselves, and this latter type of significance cannot be described in a Chronicle (...) since it would involve knowledge of the future. In the following discussion it is suggested that the difference between Ideal Chronicles and Histories, if it exists, cannot be the one suggested by Danto. It is claimed that all significance-giving relations are fully described in a Chronicle and that it is only by the order of its material that it differs from a History. (shrink)

BackgroundRecurrent Major Depressive Disorder is one of the most disabling mental disorders in modern society. Prior research has shown that self-compassion protects against ruminative tendencies, a key feature of recurrent MDD. In addition, self-compassion has been found to be positively related to higher psychophysiological flexibility in young, healthy adults. To our knowledge, there is a lack of studies on how self-compassion relates to vmHRV in patients with recurrent MDD. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether higher self-compassion (...) would associate with lower ruminative tendencies and higher vmHRV in a sample of adults with recurrent MDD.MethodsWe included a sample of 63 patients between 20 and 71 years old with a history of three or more depressive episodes. They filled out the Self-Compassion Scale, Beck Depression Inventory, and Rumination Rating Scale. ECG was acquired while resting and the square root of the mean squared differences of successive RR interval values was calculated as measure of vmHRV.ResultsAs hypothesized, self-compassion was associated with lower ruminative tendencies. However, self-compassion was not associated with level of vmHRV. Several confounding variables were controlled for in the statistical analyses, and higher age predicted lower vmHRV across all statistical analyses.ConclusionThe results confirmed our hypothesis that higher self-compassion would be associated with lower ruminative tendencies in recurrent MDD. Contrary to our expectation, we did not find that the tendency to be more self-compassionate was associated with higher vmHRV. As such, higher self-compassion seems to relate with a lower tendency to ruminate about past mistakes and events but does not seem to relate to a flexible autonomic stress response. Other potential explanatory factors for lower vmHRV in recurrent MDD is suggested as focus for exploration in future studies. (shrink)

Restoration skills training is a mindfulness-based course in which participants draw support from a natural practice setting while they learn to meditate. Well-established conventional mindfulness training can improve psychological functioning but many perceive it as demanding and fail to sustain practice habits. Applying non-inferiority logic, previous research indicated that ReST overcomes compliance problems without compromising the benefits gained over 5 weeks’ training. This article applies similar logic in a 6-month follow-up. Of 97 contacted ReST and CMT course completers, 68 responded (...) and 29 were included with multiple imputation data. The online survey included questions about their psychological functioning in three domains and the forms and frequencies with which they had continued to practice mindfulness after the course. Former ReST participants continued, on average, to show higher dispositional mindfulness and fewer cognitive lapses compared to pre-course ratings. Improved psychological functioning in one or more domains was demonstrated by 35%, as determined by a reliable change index. Again, analyses detected no indications of any substantive disadvantages compared to the more demanding, established CMT approach. Compared to the CMT group, more ReST participants had also continued to practice at least occasionally. Continued practice was linked to sustained improvements for ReST but not clearly so for CMT. ReST participants thus continued to use the skills and sustained the improvements in psychological functioning that they had gained in the course, further supporting the utility of ReST as a health intervention. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

We have two goals in this paper: first, to provide a diagnosis of global health and underline some of its blockages; second, to offer an alternative interpretation of what the demands for those in global health may be. The assumption that health is a good that requires no further explanation, and that per se it can serve as an actual modus operandi, lays the foundations of the problem. Related blockages ensue and are described using HIV prevention with a focus on (...) vaginal microbicides as a case study. Taking health as a self-evident, and self-explanatory “good” limits other possible goods; and prevents inquiry into the actual practices of creating good. We propose that to create conditions under which global health could be reconstructed, problematization be taken up as a practice, around a series of questions asked in conjunction with those ever-urgent ones of how to ameliorate the condition of living beings. (shrink)

What are some of the key historical trends in hours of work per worker in US? What economic, social-psychological, organizational and institutional forces determine the length of individuals' working hours? How much of the trend toward longer working hours among so many workers may be attributable to workers' preferences, workplace incentives or employers' constraints? When can work become overwork or workaholism – an unforced addiction to incessant work activity which risk harm to workers, families or even economies? The first part (...) of this article traces the history of the length of working hours and its recent polarization. The second part develops a multi-disciplinary model to identify motivations behind working longer hours. Individuals' desired work hours will stem from the weighted contribution of five sources: (1) current real wage rates; (2) forward-looking, wage trajectories; (3) relative status associated with hours of labor; (4) intrinsic rewards, process benefits or amenities acquired through work; (5) hours demanded by the employer and other structural constraints, to which workers may adapt. Employers and their established conditions of work have influenced the course of long run trends labor supply and in work time structures. The final section suggests policies that might address the persistence of long hours. (shrink)

Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s improvisations, or rather his interpretation as improvisation, inspires my own improvisation on Milan Kundera’s 1996 novel Slowness. Not only do I attempt to improvise, or to “interfere creatively” in Kundera’s work, but moreover, I argue that this is exactly how he himself works in Slowness with Vivant Denon’s 1777 novella No Tomorrow. Reading Kundera, as I do here, with and through Indian theory, from the 7th or 8th century poet Rājaśekhara to contemporary thinkers such as Bhattacharyya, Daya Krishna, (...) Mukund Lath and others, is not a standard move. However, it enables me to contemplate “in action” about the possibilities and impossibilities of a cross-cultural dialogue, as a potent tool of interpretation. (shrink)