Mid-Republican censors were bound by few formal restrictions in their lectiones of the Senate. So holds the scholarly communis opinio, at any rate, based primarily on Carolus Sigonius' emendation of Livy 23.23.6. This article shows Sigonius' emendation to be fatally flawed, however, and popular election to be a legal requirement for senatorial enrollment – and not just a social desideratum. This prerequisite is shown to originate in the fourth-century lex Ovinia, with ramifications for models of aristocratic rule at Rome, mid-Republican (...) political developments, and the curia itself. (shrink)

Money isn’t everything, so what is? Many government leaders, social policy theorists, and members of the general public have a ready answer: happiness. This paper examines an opposing view due to Robert Nozick, which centres on his experience-machine thought experiment. Despite the example's influence among philosophers, the argument behind it is riddled with difficulties. Dropping the example allows us to re-version Nozick's argument in a way that makes it far more forceful - and less dependent on people's often divergent intutions (...) about the experience machine. [DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE at oro.open.ac.uk repository, link below]. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

The Western Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of a wide array of economic theories of public life and the common good that emphasized the worthiness (indeed priority) of ensuring a satisfactory arrangement of economic goods primarily for the sake of meeting the physical, temporal needs of individuals from all classes and orders. The chapter surveys a plethora of texts, dating from the middle of the twelfth century up to the end of the fifteenth, that considered pragmatic issues related to how (...) the material self-interest of human beings coincided with the augmentation of public wealth within a community, and especially how governmental policies promoted or hampered the goal of personal economic improvement. Despite the diversity of and occasional discordance among these writings, all of them fundamentally agree on two interrelated points: (1) the pursuit of material self-interest, rather than conflicting with or detracting from the common good, actually supports and enhances it; (2) the responsibility of government to promote the public welfare requires paying careful attention to the protection and promotion of private advantage. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the (...) notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future. (shrink)

The papers gathered in this volume offer precise investigations of the historical and philosophical grounds for the first medieval commentaries on the ...

This book extends Alfred Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities” by describing the provinces of meaning of play, music, religious ritual, and African-American folkloric humor. Throughout these provinces, the author traces two themes: resilience and responsiveness. In resilience, individuals or communities run up against obstacles, imposed relevances, which they come to terms with, or give meaning to (in phenomenological parlance), by modifying, evading, overcoming, or accepting them. Responsiveness emerges from Schutz’s idea of making music together, which the author takes further by analyzing (...) the mimetic encounter with the other and the asymmetries in listening to music, and, especially, by showing how the features of the cognitive style of music as a province of meaning affect sociality, disposing us to be more vulnerable and attentive to each other’s non-conceptual, musical meanings. This text appeals to upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students as well as to faculty in philosophy. (shrink)

Volume of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, ed. Keith Brown.

This book features papers written by renowned international scholars that analyze the interdependence of art, phenomenology, and social science. The papers show how the analysis of the production as well as the perception and interpretation of art work needs to take into consideration the subjective viewpoint of the artist in addition to that of the interpreter. Phenomenology allows a description of the subjectively centered life-world of the individual actor-artist or interpreter-and the objective structures of literature, music, and the aesthetic domain (...) in general. The perspective of social science serves to reconstruct the socio-historical structure involved in the creation and reception of the art work. The authors concentrate on this specific theoretical focus which combines both phenomenology and social science and offers an innovative framework for the analysis of works of art from the fields of literature, music, visual arts, photography, and film. Some of the contributions present creative interpretations of a variety of distinct art works in addition to the realization of theoretical reflections on the interdependence of arts, phenomenology, and social science. This book features papers that were presented at the international and interdisciplinary conference Phenomenology, Social Sciences, and the Arts, held at the University of Konstanz, May 2009, in commemoration of philosopher and social scientist Alfred Schutz, the developer of phenomenologically oriented sociology. It will appeal to researchers, scholars, and students in phenomenology, social sciences, art theory, and the arts.. (shrink)

In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the banausos (often translated ‘mechanic’) as an occupation qualified for full civic life. Where modern admirers of Aristotle, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have taken him at face value concerning this topic and thus felt a need to distance themselves from him, I claim that the grounds that Aristotle offers for the exclusion of banausoi from citizenship are not consistent with other important teachings (found (...) in the eighth book of the Politics as well as in several of his other writings) about the nature of poesis (‘productive science’, which is the form of knowledge characteristic of the so-called ‘mechanical arts’). I further support this claim with reference to the role played by the mechanical arts within the Aristotelian framework of knowledge that one encounters in medieval European thought between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Marsiglio of Padua. (shrink)

Money isn’t everything, so what is? Many government leaders, social policy theorists, and members of the general public have a ready answer: happiness. This paper examines an opposing view due to Robert Nozick, which centres on his experience-machine thought experiment. Despite the example's influence among philosophers, the argument behind it is riddled with difficulties. Dropping the example allows us to re-version Nozick's argument in a way that makes it far more forceful - and less dependent on people's often divergent intutions (...) about the experience machine. (shrink)

In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.

Phenomenology’s reversal of naturalism hinges on the central claim that the worldly objects that we experience acquire their ontological solidity throughout series of intentional acts that are accomplished over the course of our subjective and intersubjective lives. This posture has historically given rise to realist critiques stating that such a “correlational” ontology undermines our capacity to formulate a coherent discourse on generative natural events that predate humans, such as the Big Bang, the Earth’s accretion, the formation of the oceans, etc. (...) In this paper, I articulate a Merleau-Pontian response to this problem. I establish a continuity between the temporality that is at play in the genesis of empirical bodies and the pre-objective tension that precedes perceptual givenness. I therefore suggest treating the past of nature as a transcendental past, always at work within our present experience, instead of an objective moment that would have determined in advance a causal chain of events. (shrink)

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, ...

Comedy is sacred—it's woven through the Bible. James Cary has rare first-hand experience of writing comedy for the BBC—and has a degree in theology. He and former actor and comedian, Barry Cooper (co-writer of Christianity Explored) do a weekly podcast called Cooper and Cary Have Words. This is an intelligent, funny, informative book for anyone who likes comedy.

For many years before his composition of the Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli produced a vast body of writings in a range of genres, which are seldom studied. The Rope and the Chains examines these texts in order to locate the intellectual origins of the Machiavelli with whom people are widely familiar.

sirAt a recent health authority meeting Professor Stacey, the NHSE Head of Research Ethics, was quoted as stating that for multicentre trials rapid responses were required ….

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in _Before the Law_, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics. Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between (...) those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals. (shrink)

This Article aims to draw the connection between how we conceptualize legal rights over information resources and our capacity to develop technologically neutral legal norms in the information age. More specifically, it identifies and critically examines three competing approaches to the idea of technological neutrality apparent in copyright jurisprudence. Ultimately, it is argued that true technological neutrality requires not simply the seamless expansion of legal rights into new technological contexts, but the careful, contextual recalibration of rights and interests in light (...) of shifting values and changing circumstances. As a normative principle, technological neutrality in copyright law thus demands a nuanced and relational understanding of the rights at play, and the social values that they seek to foster as technologies evolve. (shrink)

The persistently high rates of sexual assault on college campuses have led to an increasing demand for a solution to the problem. In response, research in the field is growing rapidly. With any expanding field, proper focus needs to be given to ethical dilemmas that may arise when studying a sensitive topic. College students who have experienced a sexual assault are a highly vulnerable population. As the current literature is limited, this article considers the ethical implications of conducting research with (...) college sexual assault victims. Drawing upon the 2010 American Psychological Association Ethics Code, specific ethical concerns including respect for persons, competence, confidentiality and privacy, and beneficence and nonmaleficence are discussed. Recommendations for researchers studying sexual assault in college students are provided. (shrink)

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

From the very beginning German dentists and their scientific and professional organizations were involved in the disastrous developments following the Nazi assumption of power of 1933. After purging and both organisational and ideological streamlining which had been comparatively rapidly accomplished in 1933/34 a development started which was characterized by extreme professional confrontation and lust for power in close entanglement with Nazi health policy objectives and deformation of scientific dentistry. A decisive role was assigned to the Reichszahnärzteführer Ernst Stuck (1893-1974) who (...) was the highest representative of the dental profession throughout the Nazi Regime. However, up to the present his life and position has not been thoroughly researched. What is more, history of dentistry has been looking at his activities in a merely cursory and appeasing way.In fact, his function as Reichszahnärzteführer needs to be critically scrutinized and evaluated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic LiteraturesCary Howie (bio)Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008, xii + 254 pp.Sahar Amer’s Crossing Borders adds to the expanding bibliography on medieval sexualities by showing the resonances between certain female same-sex relationships in medieval French literature and analogous, though generally more explicit, relationships between women (...) in the medieval Arabic tradition. In the process, sexuality becomes a way of talking about the porous boundaries that constitute the field of Old French, and perhaps even Western, literature as such.Amer’s book couldn’t have arrived at a better time, as Sarkozy’s French government once again, in the name of French values, intervenes in the debates around religion and clothing in the public sphere, debates in which the old divides between France and its constitutive others—in this case, certain kinds of Islam and certain kinds of women— have once again come to the fore. By proposing that “medieval French writing is essentially a hybrid, cross-cultural project” (163), Amer contributes not just to the emerging sense of the Middle Ages’ postcoloniality (as articulated by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sharon Kinoshita, among others) but also to the work being done by intellectual historians and cultural theorists such as Joan Scott and Diane Rubenstein on the fantastic investments that take place within and around French universalism (which could be said to inform the idea of the literary no less than the idea of the citizen).Crossing Borders begins with the notion of borders as “fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration” (ix), and it is the emphasis on a more general sense of cultural exchange, more than the fact of borders per se, that will permeate the chapters that follow. (In fact, the border, like “the lesbian,” Amer’s polemical term of choice for the women she describes, may be important for her argument precisely insofar as it resists visibility, as it remains to some extent difficult to locate.) Amer’s reading of Old French texts, in dialogue with a handful of medieval Arabic narratives and erotic compilations, proceeds from an understanding of medieval culture in which there is “a continuity rather than a rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of alternative [End Page 156] sexualities” (9), and in which it is possible to argue for influences that are tough, if not impossible, to trace empirically. According to this logic, ideas and stories may have circulated “next to” more tangible material goods taken to and from the Arab Islamicate world (13), and French authors may have “culled some elements from Arabic material and wove[n] them into a literary fabric to suit their audience’s sensibilities” (163). This attentiveness to what “may have” happened (e.g., 44, 110) is one of the signature gestures of Amer’s critical poetics, which I am tempted to describe as an imaginative historicism, committed at once to the explanatory power of historical context and to what Amer will repeatedly call the “imagination of the audience” (e.g., 79).After an initial chapter outlining this “cross-cultural” poetics of contextualization and imaginative investment, chapter 2, “Crossing Linguistic Borders,” is dedicated to seven stanzas of a late twelfth-century poem, Étienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, in which a long description is given of women who go “against Nature” by “join[ing] shield to shield without a lance” (32). Amer reads these military metaphors for female homoeroticism in light of Arabic sources including, for example, al-Jurjani’s eleventh-century Anthology of Metonymic Devices, in which one of the cited commonplaces observes, “They [lesbians] manifest a war in which there is no spear-thrusting” (36). Most provocatively, Amer argues for the Arabic provenance of two otherwise untranslatable words in Étienne’s text, “trutennes,” which she traces to an Arabic root meaning “the mons of the beloved” (40), and “eu,” which she interprets as an orgasmic onomatopoeia. From mons to moans, the “medieval French literary lesbian” is a condensation of forms and fantasies—and noises—that come from before and beyond medieval France. In fact, the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Waiting for CriticismCary Howie (bio)1Critical AttentionIf it is often the case that so much of what we do, as writers in a certain idiom and profession, is to wait for criticism—in the form of peer reviews, book reviews, tenure reviews, and so many other kinds of review that one would not be wrong to characterize the profession as constitutively myopic, incapable of seeing anything without looking at it again—there (...) may nonetheless be another sense in which to understand this work of waiting, this waiting for work, that comes to be called, more often than not, critical. In other words, what would it mean to think criticism as a mode of taking (and making) time? What if one of the most crucial things we do when we read and write—but also, and still more importantly, when we look at or participate in the world—is to wait? This essay aims to give space, and time, to the question of critical attention, even as it will become clear that aiming is really the last thing anyone can be expected to do while they wait.What, then, could it mean to be critically attentive? That is to say, how might it be possible to give an account of those processes and states of suspension and expectation that lie within the moment or the sequence of critical attention? This question may seem less obvious—although there’s nothing wrong with the obvious—if we recall the resonance that attention has, in French or Italian for example, with certain words for waiting, with attente or attesa; if we take seriously how attending to something or someone may also be to wait for them. Critical attention, in this way, would put on hold—for a while if not necessarily forever—the evaluative and policing functions that so frequently attend what comes to be called critical; and it would do so precisely because it would take seriously what it means, and what it feels like, to attend.For Martin Seel, this is a specifically aesthetic question: “It is,” he says, near the beginning of his Aesthetics of Appearing, “a basic characteristic of all aesthetic relations that in them we take time for the moment” [20]. To take time for the moment, as Seel puts it, is also, I’d argue, to give time; to inscribe a kind of waiting at the heart of that moment, to respond, capaciously, to the objects or persons who are convoked there. This encounter—or what I’m tempted to call this convocation—is bound up, for Seel, with the complex presence of the encountered object: “Aesthetic perception,” he writes, “wants to take something in this light, in this movement, in this tone, in this roughness and coldness, in this weather and taste” [34]. This sequence—and notice how Seel returns to that deictic pronominal adjective “this” again and again—shows at least two things: the extent to which aesthetic perception’s mode of “taking” is no mere appropriation, given the drawn out, the literally distracted, effect of the object on the perceiver; and how this deictic disarray, caught up in “this” and “this” and “this” and “this,” is fed and fueled by a kind of wanting. Aesthetic perception, in other words, wants to take; but it ends up being taken. And when it is a matter of wanting—indeed, when it is a matter of being literally for the taking—the question and the encounter become more than just aesthetic. “Attention,” Simone Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, [End Page 43] and ready to be penetrated by the object.”1 To wait for the world, for Weil, is to prepare to be entered by that (or perhaps another) world. The attentive position or disposition is also an erotic one. This preparation—about which more will be said in the second part of this essay—takes place not as prophylaxis but as seduction.I’d like, accordingly, to ask how we, singularly and in common, may be taken or, in Weil’s words, penetrated by the objects and persons we attend to; and how they, more often than not... (shrink)

Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In (...) fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. (shrink)

This essay is about the United States Supreme Court's discursive creation of two kinds of persons, one corporate the other criminal, during its 1886 term. The aim is to contrast the Supreme Court's construction of corporate personhood in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad with its view of the criminal's body in Ex parte Royall, a habeas corpus case. The Court's purpose in deciding these two cases was to design a way to disperse newly emergent and conflicting interests (...) in particular directions within the judicial apparatus. The result is that both criminal and corporate bodies come to be understood through discourse, not outside of it. So the body which is being introduced can be described as a discursive body, not as an anatomical given. (shrink)

Los medios de comunicación incrementan la cobertura de hallazgos sobre el pasado. Impedir la discriminación por razón de sexo es mandato de los códigos deontológicos periodísticos. Desde la perspectiva de género, el estudio abordó la presencia de científicas como sujetos noticiables y fuentes expertas. Se analizaron mediante técnicas cuantitativas y cualitativas mensajes (n=59) en los dos principales diarios españoles de referencia (El País, El Mundo). Es preponderante la voz del profesional de la arqueología y prima la autoría de reporteros especializados. (...) Lo femenino ocupa un segundo plano temático, que relega a la mujer como científica, especialista y reportera. (shrink)

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective (...) unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. (shrink)