As humans we are constantly engaging not only with other humans but with plants, animals, and matter. This article examines the way we view our engagement with the materiality of the world around us, by looking at the work of philosopher Jane Bennet on vibrant materiality and author Tove Jansson. Bennet presents an argument that matter can be analysed as active and vibrant. While Western philosophers are used to viewing matter as passive and dead, seeing it as active makes space (...) for different engagement with matter. One of the ways we can start engaging with matter, once we stop thinking of it as passive and dead, is through the lens of ethics. Jansson in her children’s book Moominpappa at Sea shows a possibility for looking at the material world through this ethical lens. This article will put these works in conversation by reading both as philosophical works that have nuanced engagement with the topic of how we can be in community with the things that surround us. Jansson’s work provides a helpful addition to Vibrant Matter by showing how we are inextricably entangled in harm, and providing a possible way to live with this reality. (shrink)

In The Empire of Chance, historians of science Gigerenzer et al. argue that statistical thinking has been “second to no other area of scientific endeavor” in its influence on “modern life and thought”. This article describes how quantitative descriptions of risk associated with industrialization and technological change became part of the mentality of ordinary Americans. It explains why Americans began counting accidents, tells what kinds of accidents they counted and how they counted them, and shows how statistical representations of risk (...) were used to justify prescriptions for public policy and individual behavior. On this frontier of the empire of chance, safety experts and self-styled “practical statisticians” were the principal colonizers. Distant from the centers of academic statistical science, they compromised rigorous scientific standards of methodology and accurate prediction in order to make convincing arguments outside their circles of expertise. To convey their point of view to audiences who were not literate in the field of statistics, they created a public language that conveyed statistical ideas through metaphors, graphic representations, and other rhetorical devices. They also engaged non-experts in collecting and analyzing data and, by the 1920s, even used quantitative self-measurement as a device to convince members of the public to alter their own risk-taking behaviors. (shrink)

Hope is arguably the linchpin virtue of The Lord of the Rings. In this essay, as part of a larger project intended to establish this claim, I take up Appendix A.I.v to The Lord of the Rings, the relatively self-contained “Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen.” Through a close study of the drafts for this section available in the Tolkien Archives at Marquette University, only some of which have been previously published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, as (...) well as one discovery in the Bodleian, I demonstrate that this short text, one of the very last that Tolkien prepared and finished for The Lord of the Rings, evinces a gradually increasing emphasis on the importance of hope to the narrative project as a whole. I argue, finally, that this suggests the need for both increased scrutiny of the nature and development of hope in The Lord of the Rings and the broader legendarium, as well as a return to the manuscripts for in-depth analysis of the development of (other) particular issues and themes in the texts. (shrink)