Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

Nostalgia is a fond longing for the past that has been shown to increase feelings of meaning, social connectedness, and self-continuity. Although nostalgia for personal memories provides intra- and interpersonal benefits, there may be negative consequences of group-based nostalgia on the perception and acceptance of others. The presented research examined national nostalgia, and its effects on group identification and political attitudes in the United States. In a sample of US voters, tendencies to feel personal and national nostalgia are associated with (...) markedly different emotional and attitudinal profiles. Higher levels of national nostalgia predicted both positive attitudes toward President Trump and racial prejudice, though there was no evidence of such relationships with personal nostalgia. National nostalgia most strongly predicted positive attitudes toward president Trump among those high in racial prejudice. Furthermore, nostalgia's positive relationship with racial prejudice was partially mediated by perceived outgroup threat. Results from this study will help us better understand how the experience of national nostalgia can influence attitudes and motivate political behavior. (shrink)

We had thought that poetry was a grace beyond biology, except for the biomovements of dancers, athletes, or those we love most. We had thought it a contradictory “organic” perfection in the relatively staying realm of the symbolical. But, no, according to Kristeva’s theory, poetry is essentially antiformal—in fact, so profoundly antiaesthetic that the proper words for describing it are not beauty, inspiration, form, instinctive rightness, inevitability, or delicacy . Instead, it attracts terms drawn from politics and war: corruption, infiltration, (...) disruption, shatterings, negation, supplantation, and murder. Poetry is the chora’s guerrilla war against culture.According to Kristeva, poetry reverses the ritualistic theological sacrifice of the soma, a sacrifice subsequently exacted, like a sales tax, through the “thetic” element of discourse, its determinate articulations. For Kristeva, the “theologization of the thetic” is what culture is —and as such it has no fundamental right to be, since what is fundamental is the chora and not God. I refer here as throughout to the revolutionary Kristeva of the late sixties and early seventies, the Kristeva whose “we,” as she says in “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” was a putatively communist Parisian party for “permanent revolution.”4 Revolution in Poetic Language is a monumental, late end product of this phase of Kristeva’s thinking; indeed, there are signs that she had already surpassed it by the time the book was published. 4. See Kristeva, “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” trans. Athena Viscusi, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton , pp. 219-35. Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices , a study of The Waste Land. (shrink)

. This work will be useful to all who wonder what to do about the largely negative results of postmodern thought.Ó ÑJoseph C. Flay The Resources of Rationality addresses the postmodernist assault on the claim of reason and develops a ...

Truth and correspondence, by G.J. Warnock.--Some exercises in epistemic logic, by A.N. Prior.--Symposium: Meaning and speech acts, by J.R. Searle.--Comments, by Zeno Vendler.--Comments, by Paul Benacerraf.--Rejoinders, by J.R. Searle.--Symposium: Wittgenstein on criteria, by Newton Garver.--Commments, by Carl Ginet.--Comments by F.A. Siegler.--Comments, by Paul Ziff.--Rejoinders, by Newton Garver.--Symposium: The private-language argument, by H-N. Castañeda.--Comments, by V.C. Chappell.--Comments, by J.F. Thomson.--Rejoinders, by H-N. Castañeda.

a. Lessons from science and medicine b. Lessons from industrial revolutions c. How Deep Geothermal can replace coal. d. How to sink a lot of carbon quickly.

Placez la photographie du cerveau d’Einstein au milieu d’une centaine d’autres clichés du même type : il ne fait aucun doute que n’importe quel étudiant en neurosciences le repérerait immédiatement. “ C’est aussi étrange que d’avoir deux pieds gauches , dirait-il. Comment cet individu pouvait-il danser avec deux cerveaux droits ? S’agissait-il d’un attardé mental ou d’un génie ? ” Les règles de l’origami prénatal nous sont encore largement inconnues, mais chaque étudiant apprend vite à distinguer les replis les plus (...) profonds du cerveau, tels le sillon central (tout ce qui est situé en avant de ce sillon est appelé le “ lobe frontal ”) et la scissure de Sylvius (tout ce qui est situé en dessous de cette scissure est appelé le “ lobe temporal ”). Habituellement, les deux hémisphères n’ont pas la même apparence : dans un cerveau droit typique, la scissure de Sylvius prend un tournant abrupt, un peu en arrière du sillon central, tandis que, dans le cerveau gauche, sa courbure est beaucoup moins prononcée (voir l’article d’Olivier Robain). Il sauterait donc aux yeux de notre étudiant que ces pliures dans les cerveaux droit et gauche d’Einstein sont curieusement similaires. Autre bizarrerie, les coudes des scissures de Sylvius sont situés plus en avant qu’à l’ordinaire : chez Einstein, toutes les deux aboutissent dans le sillon central. (shrink)

The study of letters, by Norman Foerster.--Language, by J.C. McGalliard.--Literary history, by René Wellek.--Literary criticism, by Austin Warren.--Imaginative writing, by W.L. Schramm.--Notes.--Bibliography (p. 239-255).

Julian N. Hartt once observed that Calvin so accentuates divine causation that he denies all secondary agency. A strong statement of God's omnipotence commits Calvin to the position that divine causation is the only connection that has any foundation in reality. And this claim, Hartt noted, places Calvin dangerously close to Spinozism. I have no stake in any analysis that attempts to indicate affinities between Calvin and the Dutch rationalist whom he predates by several generations. But, (...) as Hartt suggested and as I will demonstrate, a persuasive case can be made for Calvin's commitment to a thoroughgoing causal determinism that has God at the helm directing every event. Now one should note at the outset that Calvin has solid theological reasons for stressing the role of God's all-determining will in the course of events. As a Reformation theologian, he is a persistent defender of the utter gratuitousness of grace, thereby denying that the moral, spiritual, and epistemological chasm separating the human and the divine can in any way be reconciled by human being. Yet, for Calvin, grace possesses an omnicompetence – even faith is the gift of grace – which, when examined within the total context of his thought, reveals the radical dependence of the entire created order upon the will of God. (shrink)