The octogenarian festival in Obosi is a festival that is celebrated with a huge fanfare of pumps and pageantries. It is celebrated every three years in March to rejoice with fathers and mothers on the attainment of the age of 80. The worry of the researchers now is how this festival will be handled amid the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the absence of curative drugs. This article examines the octogenarian cultural festival during the COVID-19 pandemic in Obosi, (...) Anambra State, Nigeria. The article aims at narrating the history of octogenarians in Obosi, discussing the functions of age grades, and discussing its relevance and a discourse on this celebration amid the coronavirus. Historical and phenomenological methods were adopted for analytical purposes. The article found that the longevity of life among Obosi people has been strongly threatened by the delta variant and also that celebrants do not feel safe in sustaining the festival for fear of contracting the delta variant.Contribution: The Obosi’s Ito-ogbo celebration is a good one and it has become a homecoming for all. It has sparked a desire to provide more care to elderly parents, resulting in increased life expectancy. African traditional religion was implicated in this study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear and Loathing in Academe:Gonzo Scholarship and the War Against TourismDaniel StempelIWhen I retired in 1985 I chose as my mantra an academic version of a famous general's farewell to his troops: "Old scholars never die—they just fade away into the stacks." Now that I am an octogenarian, I have faded away into total invisibility, but, like Tithonus, I am not inaudible. I hope my voice will be (...) strident enough to disturb the utopian dreams of a new generation, although I doubt that it will wake them from their dogmatic slumbers. My decision to return to the wars of intellect was occasioned by a chance discovery as I haunted the periodical stacks. I noted the name of an old friend in the title of an article and was surprised to find him pilloried as both a "liberal white Protestant" and a "white supremacist," terms which do not, in my experience, necessarily go together.The article, "Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day," written by Paul Lyons, a member of the University of Hawai'i English department's Cultural Studies group, uses bell, book, and candle of the new postcolonial faith in a rite of exorcism to dispel the evil influences of commercial tourism.1 As every exorcist knows, the rite demands that a demon must be called by his name and Lyons has chosen to demonize a deceased member of the English department. Grove Day came to Hawaii in 1944 and retired in 1969. He served as chairman from 1948 to 1953 and taught the course in Literature of the Pacific until his retirement in 1969. He began as a freelance writer long before he decided to enter graduate school at [End Page 95] Stanford and continued to publish more than fifty books on Hawaii and the Pacific. In 1979 he received the State Award for Literature. He died in 1994 in a plunge from an upper floor of a retirement home. Paul Lyons, by his own admission, came to Hawaii in 1990 knowing nothing of its history and culture but soon became a self-appointed authority on Hawaii, its colonial past and present, and its postcolonial future, eagerly embracing the ideas disseminated by the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the university.His article begins with a pretentious elaboration of the method he plans to use to raze the Potemkin village of tourism. Invoking the authority of Hegel on appearance and reality in a passage he has found cited by Žižek, he follows Dean MacCannell, who has adapted Erving Goffman's distinction between dramatic front and back: the entertaining scene presented to the tourist public contrasts with the backstage machinery of the stagehands who put it all together to deceive gullible visitors.2 He combines this with a quotation he has found in a book by William V. Spanos, the founder and former editor of Boundary 2, taken from a journalist's view of the Vietnam War, complaining that they had all been "deeply backgrounded." These are enlisted in the service of MacCannell's quest for "authenticity" as the touchstone of all encounters with other cultures, including the tourist experience.Had Lyons, instead of accepting MacCannell's interpretation of Goffman's early work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), taken a closer look at this witty and ironic study of social behavior in a small community in the Shetland Islands, he would have found that Goffman makes no judgment on the comparative authenticity of either front or back. He utilizes what may be called the J. Alfred Prufrock theory of interaction between individuals and the groups in which they find themselves: "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...." MacCannell, in contrast, sees the tourist as a Tennysonian Ulysses in pursuit of a horizon of authenticity that recedes into infinity, "whose margin fades / Forever and forever as I move."Of course, the front/back and foreground/background binary oppositions and the insistence on authenticity are commonplaces rooted in the ubiquitous literary and philosophical tradition of "All the world's a stage" and require no... (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentRecently older people have been the target of filmmakers and marketing campaigns; the concept of the “grey pound” has become a potentially significant attraction encouraging filmmakers to explore issues relating to age and ageing in mainstream films. The recent success of films such as Mamma Mia and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel have made a significant impact on the box office, and Amour securing the 2013 Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, proved that (...) an older audience is eager to watch films with mature characters and about issues that are relevant and meaningful to them.Actor Dustin Hoffman chose the play, Quartet by Ronald Harwood, to make his directorial debut. Set in “Beecham House,” a residential home for retired musicians, Hoffman explores brilliantly the diversity of octogenarians. The home is under the threat of closure unless the residents raise a substantial amount of money to keep it open, and their cunning plan to do that is by organizing a charitable evening gala fea. (shrink)

The full range of Bentham's engagement with Blackstone's view of law is beyond the scope of a single article. Yet it is important to recognize at the outset, even in a more restricted enquiry into the matter, that the engagement, begun when Bentham, not quite sixteen years of age, started to attend Blackstone's Oxford lectures, was indeed a lifelong affair. Whatever Bentham had in mind when, at the age of eighty, in 1828, he began to write a work entitled ‘A (...) familar view of Blackstone: or say Blackstone familiarized’, the manuscripts at least suffice to prove that ‘Our Author’ was still in the forefront of his mind at that octogenarian but still indefatigably active stage of his career. Every aspect of Bentham's multifarious intellectual activity over the intervening decades had been touched in some measure by his response to Blackstone's ideas. It still seems true to say what was said a dozen years ago: It would be an exaggeration to say that Bentham elaborated his own conception of law by way of a constant and conscious dialectic with the views of Blackstone. But it would be an exaggeration for which the evidence would afford some excuse. (shrink)

This case analysis examines questions that arise when an ethically appropriate recommendation initially appears to be in conflict with the legally appropriate recommendation. The case involves a dying, incapacitated octogenarian who had friends who were willing to share her values, but not to make decisions on her behalf. These circumstances put the patient in the unique position of being legally considered a “patient alone,” but who was ethically like a patient with surrogates—distinctions that are crucial when making end-of-life decisions (...) under the New York Family Health Care Decisions Act. A strict interpretation of the law initially seemed to be in conflict with an ethically appropriate outcome. By gaining a deeper understanding of the patient from those who cared about her, however, and by considering a broader interpretation of the law, an outcome was reached that worked within the framework of the law and honored the patient’s reported values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Women Englishing Homer RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON Seven kingdoms strove in which should swell the womb / That bore great Homer; whom Fame freed from tomb,” so begins the fourth of “Certain ancient Greek Epigrams ” that George Chapman placed at the head of his Odyssey at its debut in 1615.1 The epigram was no mere antiquarian dressing for the text. It suggests a historical parallel with the translator’s (...) own feat—for this Odyssey appeared on the heels of Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer directly from the Greek. Indeed, the title page of that Iliad boasted, “Never before in any language truly translated” (italics mine). In “Englishing ” Homer (as he put it), Chapman had vanquished not only local rivals but also the whole international field.2 Through Chapman, England bore Homer anew. Yet within a few decades challengers appeared. An octogenarian Thomas Hobbes published an Odyssey translation in 1675 and an Iliad the following year. Alexander Pope’s versions (Iliad, 1715–1720; Odyssey, 1726) were bestsellers in the next century, yet others soon enough sought to better them, including the poet William Cowper (Iliad, 1791; Odyssey, 1809). The rate of Homeric production then intensified in the nineteenth century, becoming in Edith Hall’s apt phrase a “national pastime” in Victorian Britain—and, I would add, in the United States too.3 In the 1860s, a new English Iliad or Odyssey debuted nearly every year, making Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, seem prescient in selecting “On Translating Homer” as the topic for his 1860 lecture series. Anglo-American output of new English Homers has been steady ever since. The opening decades arion 26.3 winter 2019 of our century have been especially high-yielding—more than ten new Iliads and eight new Odysseys have appeared in print alongside fresh editions of twentieth-century favorites. Digital versions now circulate, too. To Chapman we might thus reply: Once seven Greek cities strove to be Homer’s nurse; now seventy tomes vie to be his English verse. Run down the complete bibliography, and a pattern already hinted in my list of notables becomes pronounced: name after name after name belongs to a man. Flip around a bit, and one can often find traces of women in these volumes. Hobbes, for example, argued in the preface to his translations that women have as “just” a “pretence” (in the sense of “claim”) as men to the moral education afforded by heroic poems, though one might cynically read this as a marketing strategy.4 Pope readily acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Homer’s first French female translator, and listed prominent female supporters in the subscription lists at the front of his editions.5 Women thus long factored into the business of “Englishing” classical texts, though almost exclusively as paying audience members. For more than four centuries, Homer’s English audience listened to a boys’ choir. That tune has only just begun to change thanks to the efforts of three women: the classicist and nonfiction writer Caroline Alexander, who became the first woman to publish a complete English Iliad in 2015; Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who published the first English Odyssey by a female translator in 2017; and the poet Alice Oswald, whose selective translation of the Iliad, Memorial, appeared in 2011.6 By virtue of their appearance in such short order, these books have been, and surely will be henceforth, grouped together. And rightly so: ending the male monopoly on the English channel to Homer is a major development. The Homeric epics have not only shaped Western culture; they enjoy enduring prestige. You still need to know Homer to fancy yourself “well-read.” These three books are thus 36 on women englishing homer potent symbols. They mark the passage of English-speaking women from the audience of male efforts to curate and transmit tradition to participants in those endeavors—from the subscription lists, we might say, to the title page. We sell these translations short, though, if we allow their collective meaning to obscure the patent differences in Alexander’s, Wilson’s, and Oswald... (shrink)

In June 2009, the Chinese mediasphere was abuzz with the announcement that the octogenarian writer Jin Yong (Louis Cha) was slated to join the Chinese Writers' Association (Zhongguo zuojia xiehui, CWA). Jin Yong is a beloved martial arts fiction writer who made his career in the freewheeling ex-British colony of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s.1 His joining the association known for its stodgy conformism struck many as ironic, or at least as blog-worthy. Indeed, just a few years (...) ago, the playwright Sha Yexin had quipped: “How can you ask a writer like Louis Cha to write martial arts…. (shrink)

‘Fascinating’, ‘brilliant’, ‘oddly moving’, ‘a warm human picture’ – this biography was enthusiastically received when it came out in 1957. And no wonder. It is not only the lively story of a distinguished man but a lucid account of his work and its significance. The author, who was himself a philosopher and journalist, has followed the bright thread of Russell’s personality with affectionate insight, from the three-day-old baby who looked about him ‘in a very energetic way’, and the boy who (...) jibbed at taking Euclid on trust, through the many turns of his life, to the undimmed octogenarian, still questioning and still deeply concerned. The subject is a great one and the biographer has matched it. (shrink)

This valuable collection of lectures, articles and interviews is a rare introduction to an octogenarian scholar and a decisive leader in the new development of ecumenical theology, who is revealed at work immediately preceding the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Bea has shown a notable talent for lucid explanation in public as well as quiet insistence upon basic principle in the sympathetic appreciation of the endemic divisions among Christian believers, which inevitably blur the image of Christ for (...) thinking non-Christians. In correction the creative example of Pope John was ‘intended to read the lesson of a new approach’ which the Introduction of the late Apostolic Delegate to Britain succinctly notes. (shrink)

In this closely packed survey of basic Scholastic concepts the octogenarian author has siphoned off the cream of a half-century's reflection upon them. Contrary to a much trumpeted contemporary outlook, he takes the refreshing stand that not only the questions the Scholastics asked but "also their answers have still much of importance to tell us today". He notes that while "Scholasticism" covers unsystematized differences in thought, a doctrinal as well as historical account of its basic concepts and their relations (...) to today's use of the terms for them is possible. Though recognizing appropriate truth in Scholastics such as Albert, Scotus, Cajetan, and Suarez, he focuses the thrust of his inquiry upon Aquinas, who has not always been correctly understood by professed followers. With warning to avoid any reifying or hypostatizing of its principles and notions he regards metaphysics as the basic philosophy, understanding it not as a philosophical theology but as an ontology. Consequently the basic concepts will above all be metaphysical. (shrink)

In the past twenty years, scholarly interest in John Dewey's later writings has surged. While later works such as Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939) have received considerable attention, Knowing and the Known (1949), Dewey's late-in-life collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, has been largely neglected. A common bias among Dewey scholars is that this work, instead of developing Dewey's Logic, departs from its spirit, reflects the overbearing influence of Bentley on Dewey (...) (who was at the time an octogenarian), and, therefore, merits little serious scholarly consideration. However, Dewey and Bentley engaged in an extended correspondence, collected in John Dewey and Arthur Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932-1951 (1964), the result of which was no less than a watershed moment in Dewey's thinking on the experimental method of inquiry. The Logic was improved in ways that incorporated the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce's logic and developed Dewey's earlier work in a direction expressly intended by the aging pragmatist. Indeed, Dewey writes in correspondence with his co-author: "You [Bentley] shouldn't lean too heavily on the [1938] Logic; it wasn't a bad job at the time, but I could do better now [with Knowing and the Known]; largely through association with you and getting the courage to see my thing [logical theory] through without compromise" (Correspondence, 4:595, see also 184, 420, 481, 483-84). One of the few scholars of American pragmatism to acknowledge that Knowing and the Known was a watershed development in Dewey's thinking is Frank X. Ryan, author of an exciting new book, Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, that clearly and concisely presents the revolutionary method developed in Knowing and Known: the transactional approach. (shrink)

The increasing age of the patient population around the globe and in the United States has resulted in a growing number of patients with dementia. In this manuscript, we examined the role of the ethics consultation service in patients who have dementia and associated cognitive and neuropsychiatric sequelae. We addressed a particularly challenging case presenting with behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. We discussed the ethical questions and challenges considered by the ethics consultation service and compared these with current suggestions (...) and expectations from the research literature regarding the role of ethics consultation service in dementia management. We demonstrated two potentially useful approaches of clinical ethical analysis, the principalist theorem and Jonsen's four quadrants approach. While the number of consults in patients with behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia is likely to increase in clinical ethics, the role of the ethics consultation service in this cohort of patients still remains to be determined. There are significant gaps in understanding of the ethics consultation service role in dementia management, and much work remains to be undertaken on the part of regulatory and healthcare systems in clarifying their roles, expectations, and competencies. (shrink)