Much ink has already been spilled on the relationship of constitutional originalism to precedent. The debate includes contributions from Randy Barnett, Steven Calabresi, Kurt Lash, Gary Lawson, John McGinnis with Michael Rappaport, Michael Paulsen, and Lee Strang, not to mention Justice Antonin Scalia—all representing originalism in some form. Living constitutionalism has also been represented both implicitly and explicitly, with important contributions from Phillip Bobbitt, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Gerhardt, Randy Kozel, and David Strauss. Some writers are more difficult to (...) classify; Akhil Amar comes to mind. And there are many other contributions to the debate. Opinions range from the view that precedent should invariably prevail over the original public meaning of the constitutional text to the polar opposite view, that precedent must give way to original meaning in almost every case. Here is the roadmap. Part I provides a brief introduction to contemporary originalism. Part II describes the problem of precedent for originalism, emphasizing that the nature of the problem depends in part on our understanding of precedent. Part III offers some reflections on the question as to the constitutional status of the doctrine of horizontal stare decisis in the United States Supreme Court. (shrink)

This book examines the origins of philosophy in Greek Antiquity and considers key moments of philosophic history as related to revolutionary change, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the May Events of 1968 and beyond. David Black reads Hegel's philosophy--which seems to come to the fore at various "birthtimes in history"--as anticipating Marx's critique of capital, in which the logic of the system intimates a realm beyond it.

In this book, David Levine explores the unknown self. The unknown self is the self existing as a potential to become something yet to be determined. The shape our personalities and life experiences take depends on a process. At the outset of this process, the self is, in a sense, a stranger; both to us and to others. The more this is the case, the greater the openness of the process of self-formation to a kind of freedom, which is (...) the freedom from predetermination of its outcome. In exploring this process, the book considers such topics as: the nature of inner freedom and its relationship to deliberation and choice; stranger anxiety and its connection to group dynamics and social connection; the internal factors that enable us to make the decisions that shape our lives and through our actions realise the ends embedded in our decisions; how our memories shape our choices and the lives we lead that result from them; what makes it possible for us to live comfortably with and depend on people we do not know; concern for the welfare of strangers and how our welfare can be secure in a world where others do not care about us or us about them. (shrink)

David Ellison's book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison's study traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and emphasizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny. Arguing that what we call High Modernism cannot be reduced to a religion of beauty, an experimentation with narrative form, or (...) even a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand and imaginative literature on the other. (shrink)

Terry Eagleton is the foremost Marxist cultural theorist of our time. In the first book-length study of this highly influential figure, David Alderson provides detailed discussions of Eagleton's Marxism and his engagements with postmodernism, as well as an evaluation of his interventions in Irish Studies. Each of the chapters in this important intervention in current theoretical debates offers accessible contextualization of the key issues and provides detailed analyses of Eagleton's literary criticism. Alderson shows that the complex relations between nature, (...) culture and ideology, body, subjectivity and authority are at the heart of Eagleton's ethical and political concerns. He goes on to demonstrate that these relations inform the theorist's critical examinations of such literary works as Wuthering Heights and The Merchant of Venice, and his treatment of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

In this profound book, based on a popular audio program, Dr. David Hawkins gives a primer on his world-famous map of consciousness that will help the reader embark on their own journey to an advanced state of consciousness. David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D, conducted a 29-year study that demonstrated that the human body becomes stronger or weaker depending on a person's mental state. He created a scale from 1 to 1,000 that mapped human consciousness. Furthermore, he demonstrated that this (...) map can be used as a blueprint to reach higher states of consciousness that can be identified simply by applying a small amount of pressure on an outstretched arm! Not only that, but this simple method has also been demonstrated to be an effective tool for instantly calibrating human consciousness. Dr. Hawkins created a scale of consciousness based on current discoveries in advanced theoretical physics and the nonlinear dynamics of chaos theory. And this “map of consciousness” now makes it possible for anyone to advance toward higher levels of enlightenment faster than ever imagined! (shrink)

Each year a national day of commemoration of the war dead is celebrated on 11th November in the United Kingdom. Despite public controversy about the nature and purpose of remembrance, there has been no significant discussion of the role schools should play in this event. In this centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, with the government planning to send groups from every secondary school in Britain to tour the battlefields of the western front over the next (...) four years, the question of how war should be remembered in schools is more pressing than ever. In this bold and rigorous pamphlet, David Aldridge takes a hard look at the reasons usually advanced for involving children and young people in commemorating the war dead, and finds many of them wanting. He critically examines the high profile in schools of charities, like the Royal British Legion, with vested interests in certain kinds of commemoration. And he argues forcefully for a justification of remembrance in schools that requires a major rethink of established rituals and practices. This is a compelling treatment of a topic high on the agenda of teachers and education policy-makers and will be an invaluable resource for anyone involved in planning centenary commemorative events for children and young people. (shrink)

Pádraig Hogan has argued for a powerful conception of education as epiphany that is illuminated by the work of Heidegger and Joyce. But what are we to make of Stephen Dedalus’ intention (pretension?) to ‘Remember your epiphanies’? Developing the phenomenological Erinnerungsversuch or ‘essay in memory’ of David Farrell Krell, I will examine three ‘epiphanic fragments’ from the literature of education. The problem of the temporality of the educational epiphany will be identified and a resolution will be attempted. I hope (...) thus to extend an ontological account of memory into the educational experience, and also to develop the educational significance of the remembered or recollected epiphany. The article concludes with some emerging thoughts on the relation of education, literature and vocation. (shrink)

In _Listening in the Afterlife of Data_, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of (...) its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems. (shrink)

Wordsmiths and Warriors explores the heritage of English through the places in Britain that shaped it. It unites the warriors, whose invasions transformed the language, with the poets, scholars, reformers, and others who helped create its character. David and Hilary Crystal drove thousands of miles to locations throughout Britain, David providing the descriptions, Hilary the full-colour photographs. Their book reflects the language's history starting with Anglo-Saxon arrivals and ending in London with apps for grammar. In between lie encounters (...) with places associated with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Johnson, Murray, and numerous others. Among its many joys are the unexpected discoveries the authors make at every stage of their epic journey. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Love Against Revenge in Shelley's Prometheus David Bromwich I THE MODERNIST PREJUDICE AGAINST SHELLEY has almost disappeared, but when I talk to friends I discover that few have ever cared for his poetry, and if they go back now to read him sometimes they reinvent the prejudice. This resistance is not indifference. Shelley can disturb one's self-knowledge and (...) even one's idea of what self-knowledge may be; and in reaction against the unheard-of demand he routinely makes, one is apt to dismiss him as extravagant. Much of Shelley continues to be outside my range, and occasionally I feel him pulling farther away, as if his starting point were my outermost limit. The fact is shaming enough to prompt a decorous defensiveness. Yet in many of his most far-fetched poems, it seems to me, he justifies his procedures as one looks for a great artist to do. The main reason we find his poetry difficult is its difficulty.Shelley was a member of the first generation to accept the French Revolution as an accomplished change in the world. It was, he thought, a change for the better; he considered himself a revolutionary, though the Terror and the Napoleonic wars left their chastening mark on him. A sentence from the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, of 1817, states most clearly an intuition he held as deeply a year later when he wrote the first act of Prometheus Unbound: "There is a reflux in the tide of human things which bears the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven after the storms are past." 1 Humanity, by the adaptive work of thoughts and feelings, will prove to have readied itself for any great mutation that occurs in society; so that the violence of a revolution is likely to be [End Page 239] extrinsic and unnecessary. The reasons for the assurance implicit here are brought forward in the two great prose works of his last years, A Defence of Poetry and A Philosophical View of Reform. By the time any revolution happens in life, Shelley believes, it has already happened in language, with causes that are as visible as the difference between a living and a dead metaphor. Poetry—by which he means anything imaginative and man-made whose good survives the defects of its maker—"redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." He thinks that poets (including some lawgivers and social critics) are "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present." The last phrase, from the closing paragraph of A Defence of Poetry, seemed to Shelley important enough to be used also in A Philosophical View of Reform. For him, the principle of reform in language is identical with the principle of reform in thought and action.His doctrine belongs to the high Enlightenment, and he had accepted, more complacently, I believe, in his poetry than in his prose, the idea of the poet or thinker or man-of-mind as a bringer of light to humanity. That ideal was strong in Wordsworth too, with his conception of the poet as "the rock of defence for human nature," but in Shelley it exists in tension with another belief: that the instinct for acting and suffering at the bidding of a nature "not our own" may become as general as the appeal of the revolution now accomplished. Only in having a language for thoughts and feelings does the poet differ from other men and women. This, for Shelley, is a difference not (as it was for Wordsworth) between a speaker and a listener, but rather like that between a translator and a reader. If the poet were unique in the way a revolutionary leader is unique, he would be the protagonist of a fable of revenge that needs likewise its antagonist. Our thoughts about change go along these lines because they tend to be thoughts about contest. But in his later poetry, and in Prometheus Unbound above all, Shelley was looking at... (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Environmental Protection Agency has adopted new regulations that prevent the agency from conducting or funding intentional exposure research involving children, pregnant women, or fetuses. I argue that these regulations overprotect children, and that the EPA should revise them to conform with Subpart D of the Department Health and Human Services’ regulations governing research with humans.

Near the end of the fifth book of Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle has a brief discussion of suicide, to illustrate the question of whether one can wrong one's self. Suicide, he declares, is not enjoined by law, and what law does not enjoin, it forbids. Thus the suicide does do wrong – but to whom or what? Surely the polis, not himself . δι κα πλις ζημιο, κα ις τιμα πρσεστι τ αυτν διαφθεραντι ς π πλιν δικοντι.

A guide for scientists who would like to contribute to the professional development of science teachers for elementary schools. Based on information from over 180 programs, describes what activities work and why, and suggests how to identify programs teachers have found to be effective and take the initial steps to become involved. Also provides vignettes illustrating the daily work of science teachers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This book argues that Western studies of East-Asian politics are generally flawed due to their adherence to the premise that liberal democracy is the best form of governance. The book rejects the three main schools of the Western interpretation of Oriental politics and instead examines the border-transcending powers of Confucianism that have, over more than twenty-two centuries, transformed the politics of East Asia. By circumventing the fundamental methodical and ethical assumptions of the Anglophone hegemonic discourse on the politics of the (...) non-Western world, it effectively presents an alternative to traditional Western interpretations of East Asian politics. Written in an erudite and engaging way this book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Asian studies, Asian politics and political philosophy. (shrink)

How should we look at the world? How can we live our lives fully? In How to Look at Everything, acclaimed photographer David Finn turns his keen focus on how to experience the world around us in greater depth. The author of Abrams' best-selling books How to Look at Sculpture, How to Look at Photographs, and How to Visit a Museum here turns to the problem of developing an enriched way of seeing. In a thoughtful series of essays, he (...) offers a personal view of how to enjoy more fully the pleasures that make life truly worth living: beautiful sights, fascinating objects, shared experiences, and warm companionship. (shrink)

In this book, David Brown considers the ways in which biblical narratives have been presented--and changed--over the centuries. He then determines how these changes have impacted the understanding and practice of Christian discipleship.

Nancy Warner's photographs tell the stories of buildings that were once loved yet have now been abandoned. Her evocative images are juxtaposed with the voices of Nebraska farm people, lovingly recorded by sociologist David Stark.

The nature of masculinity is a popular subject for contemporary authors, either treated critically from a sociological standpoint, or analysed from a psychological and spiritual perspective. In _Remaking Men_, David Tacey argues that we must strive to bridge the gap between these separate traditions - masculinity should neither be hijacked by the spiritual, Jung-influenced men's movement, nor discussed merely as a product of socio-political forces. Examining his own and other men's experience in a critical and lively discourse he evades (...) the simplistic optimism of the 'inner journey' approach and the chronic pessimism of contemporary academic arguments. This is a fascinating and very accessible look at masculinity for those who want to explore self and society with intelligence and soul. (shrink)

Scholars have sometimes argued that we should conceive of social research as a form of moral inquiry, at least in part, but none have made clear exactly how and why observational research can make a distinctive contribution to moral insight. Returning to an era before the modern distinction between social science and the humanities became entrenched, this article argues that Adam Smith provided a clear and forceful rationale for the moral role of social research, especially history. Smith believed that moral (...) understanding relies on emotional reactions to richly described cases, preferably where our own interests are not at stake. These meditations on particular cases, in turn, provide the basis for moral generalizations that can inform future encounters with particular cases. This perspective led Smith (along with his friend David Hume) to the view that historical writing makes a more important contribution to moral understanding than abstract philosophy does. This article reconstructs Smith’s arguments about the role of empirical observation in cultivating moral sensibility in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his Lectures on Jurisprudence, and his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. It then connects his argument to contemporary ideas about the nature of moral understanding in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

This theoretical psychological study comprises an illustration and analysis of the experience of "unknowing" described in contemplative and mystical literature. Materials examined were drawn from exponents of the West's "via negativa" and from the Japanese Zen master, Eihei Dosen. Although ultimately a non-discursive and ineffable mode of experience, the accounts of contemplative unknowing are shown in this study to bear a number of discernible common features. Psycho-spiritual techniques enjoined to inculcate the experience of unknowing are also examined. This study proposes (...) that the latter can be productively understood as forms of deconstruction, finding that "contemplative deconstruction" is effectively the deconstruction of the self, arrived at in an experienced shift in one's relationship to one's own experiencing . As an elucidating contrast and comparison, an extended discussion is provided of the postmodern deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. Discussion is also included of currents within contemporary Western psychological discourse which show some promise for further aiding our understanding of contemplative experiences, namely, social constructivist psychology's investigations of the self and transpersonal psychology's valorization of East/West mysticism. It is suggested that, despite the extreme worth and impress on the lives of those who have such experiences , the discourse of contemporary mainstream psychology has yet to give adequate space in its investigations to the phenomena of contemplative praxis. (shrink)