In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores for (...) centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than FAS, it follows from these two premises that abortion is immoral. Critics have focussed on the ceteris paribus (...) clause of TIP, which requires that the relevant details surrounding each impairment be sufficiently similar. In this article, we show that the ceteris paribus clause is superfluous, and by replacing it with a more restrictive condition, the impairment argument is considerably strengthened. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

This book is the complete story of the creation of the universe, as it was understood by the ancient Egyptians. It is a collection of harmonic and radical 'Black Thoughts' and the pursuit of equality for all of this planet's inhabitants"--P. vii.

William Simkulet has recently criticised Colgrove et al’s defence against what they have called inconsistency arguments—arguments that claim opponents of abortion (OAs) act in ways inconsistent with their underlying beliefs about human fetuses (eg, that human fetuses are persons at conception). Colgrove et al presented three objections to inconsistency arguments, which Simkulet argues are unconvincing. Further, he maintains that OAs who hold that the fetus is a person at conception fail to act on important issues such as the plight of (...) frozen embryos, poverty and spontaneous abortion. Thus, they are morally negligent. In response, we argue that Simkulet has targeted a very narrow group of OAs, and so his criticisms are inapplicable to most OAs. We then explain why his responses to each of Colgrove et al’s objections do not succeed, even for this restricted group. Finally, we note that Simkulet fails to provide evidence for his claims regarding OAs’ supposed failures to act, and we show that OAs veritably do invest resources into these important issues. We conclude that Colgrove et al’s reasons for rejecting inconsistency arguments (en masse) remain intact. (shrink)

A comprehensive introductory study of the key concepts and problems in traditional and contemporary metaphysics. Aune presents and defends a point of view that is naturalistic, nominalistic and pragmatic-an approach that has the overall advantage of providing a coherent, structured view of the topics he discusses.

Machine generated contents note: Part I -- Doctors -- Dr. Joseph Messer -- Dr. Sharon Sandell -- ER -- Dr. John Barrett -- Marc and Noreen Levison, a paramedic and a nurse -- Lloyd (Pete) Haywood, a former gangbanger -- Claire Hellstern, a nurse -- Ed Reardon, a paramedic -- Law and Order -- Robert Soreghan, a homicide detective -- Delbert Lee Tibbs, a former death-row inmate -- War -- Dr. Frank Raila -- Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer -- Tammy Snider, (...) a Hiroshima survivor (hibakusha) -- Mothers and Sons -- V.I.M. (Victor Israel Marquez), a Vietnam vet -- Angelina Rossi, his mother -- Guadalupe Reyes, a mother -- God's Shepherds -- Rev. Willie T. Barrow -- Father Leonard Dubi -- Rabbi Robert Marx -- Pastor Tom Kok -- Rev. Ed Townley -- The Stranger -- Rick Rundle, a city sanitation worker -- Part II -- Seeing Things -- Randy Buescher, an associate architect -- Chaz Ebert, a lawyer -- Antoinette Korotko-Hatch, a church worker -- Karen Thompson, a student -- Dimitri Mihalas, an astronomer and physicist -- A View from the Bridge -- Hank Oettinger, a retired printer -- Ira Glass, a radio journalist -- Kid Pharaoh, a retired "collector" -- Quinn Brisben, a retired teacher -- Kurt Vonnegut, a writer -- The Boomer -- Bruce Bendinger, an advertising executive and writer -- Part III -- Fathers and Sons -- Doc Watson, a folksinger -- Vernon Jarrett, a journalist -- Country Women -- Peggy Terry, a retired mountain woman -- Bessie Jones, a Georgia Sea Island Singer (1972) -- Rosalie Sorrels, a traveling folksinger -- The Plague I -- Tico Valle, a young man -- Lori Cannon, "curator" of the Open Hand Society -- Brian Matthews, an ex-bartender, writer for a gay weekly -- Jewell Jenkins, a hospital aide -- Justin Hayford, a journalist, musician -- Matta Kelly, a case manager -- The Old Guy -- Jim Hapgood -- The Plague II -- Nancy Lanoue -- Out There -- Dr. Gary Slutkin -- Day of the Dead -- Carlos Cortez, a painter and poet -- Vine Deloria, a writer and teacher -- Helen Sclair, a cemetery familiar -- The Other Son -- Steve Young, a father -- Maurine Young, a mother -- The Job -- William Herdegen, an undertaker -- Rory Moina, a hospice nurse -- The End and the Beginning -- Mamie Mobley, a mother -- Dr. Marvin Jackson, a son -- Epilogue -- Kathy Fagan and Linda Gagnon, mothers. (shrink)

At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis was soon liberated from the precincts of scientific cultivation to enter into cultural free association. Nonetheless, scientific and scholarly attention and debate have long precipitated a bona fide discourse of Gaia theory. Moreover, intellectually serious extra-scientific figures of Gaia have also been on the rise in the last decade. This essay treats a selection of these newer Gaian figures, specifically, Isabelle Stengers’s Gaia (...) the Intruder and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia, in relation to Lovelock’s Gaia and Lynn Margulis’s evocations of autopoietic Gaia. When nuanced through second-order systems theory, the discourse of autopoietic Gaia satisfies Stengers’s and Latour’s demands for a non-holistic, heterogeneous yet coherent Gaia concept fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch. (shrink)

"[Wilshire] establishes a phenomenology of theatre, a theory of enactment, and a theory of appearance, none of which American theatre... has ever had." —Performing Arts Journal "... Wilshire makes unique contributions to understanding major aspects of the human condition in its necessary search for selfhood." —Process Studies "It is one of the American classics." —Human Studies.

At first glance, atheism seems simple to define. If atheism is the negation of theism, and if theism is the view that at least one god exists, then atheism is the negation of this view. However, the common definitions that follow from this insight suffer from two problems: first, they often leave undefined what “god” means, and, second, they understate the scope of the disagreement between theists and atheists, which often has as much to do with the fundamental character of (...) reality as with the existence of one being in it. Some writers address the second problem by reinterpreting atheism as the logical consequence of particular metaphysical views, such as naturalism or physicalism, which are then taken as the true meaning of atheism. These interpretations, though more satisfactory in some respects, can result in concepts of atheism that are unclear or too narrow, and they often still leave “god” undefined. In this paper, I propose that atheism be defined as the proposition that reality is solely an impersonal order. Theism is the proposition that reality is not solely an impersonal order, being either a personal order, that is, an order founded by at least one person, or an impersonal order plus at least one transcendent person. A god is a person who is not subject to the laws governing that order and thus transcends it. I explain these definitions and briefly discuss some of their implications. First I survey prior definitions of atheism to display the problems they raise. (shrink)

Don Marquis’ future-like-ours account argues that abortion is seriously immoral because itdeprives the embryo or fetus of a valuable future much like our own. Marquis was mindful ofcontraception being reductio ad absurdum of his reasoning, and argued that prior tofertilisation, there is not an identifiable subject of harm. Contra Marquis, Tomer Chaffercontends that the ovum is a plausible subject of harm, and therefore contraception deprives theovum of a future-like-ours. In response, I argue that being an identifiable subject of harm is (...) notsufficient for Marquis’ argument to succeed. In addition, we must also share our identity withan ovum. I show that on the account of personal identity utilised by Marquis’ defenders, weare not identical with an ovum. As a result, Chaffer’s reductio fails. (shrink)

_Neocybernetics and Narrative_ opens a new chapter in Bruce Clarke’s project of rethinking narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s potential to provide fresh insights into the familiar topics of media studies and narrative theory. A pioneer of systems narratology, Clarke offers readers a synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and (...) cultivated in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. From this foundation, he interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of cognition. Clarke’s purview includes examinations of novels, movies, and even _Aramis_, Bruno Latour’s idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated subway. Clarke declares the era of the cyborg to have ended, laid to rest as the ontology of technical objects is brought into differential coordination with operations of living, psychic, and social systems. The second-order discourse of cognition destabilizes the usual sense of cognition as conscious awareness, revealing the possibility of nonconscious and nonhuman forms of sentience. (shrink)

Transparency lies at the heart of most modern slavery reporting legislation, but while publication of statements is mandatory, conformance with content guidance is voluntary, such that overall, corporate responses have been poor. Existing studies, concentrated in business to consumer rather than inter-organisational contexts, have not undertaken the fine-grained assessments of statements needed to identify which aspects of reporting performance are particularly poor and the underlying reasons that need to be addressed by policy makers. In a novel design, this study utilises (...) the ethical trade initiative assessment framework to evaluate the content of 95 UK government suppliers’ modern slavery statements. The findings suggest that in a modern slavery context, discovery challenges are more important than firms’ attitudes to disclosure. We contribute to the transparency literature through a model contrasting discovery costs and disclosure risks and by identifying the disclosure of unknowns as an additional relevant dimension of disclosure. We then discuss the model in relation to normativity theory to consider options through which the currently low legitimacy of the reporting governance regime can be enhanced and the intended norms established. (shrink)

Newton certainly regarded his second law of motion in the Principia as a fundamental axiom of mechanics. Yet the works that came after the Principia, the major treatises on the foundations of mechanics in the eighteenth century—by Varignon, Hermann, Euler, Maclaurin, d’Alembert, Euler (again), Lagrange, and Laplace—do not record, cite, discuss, or even mention the Principia’s statement of the second law. Nevertheless, the present study shows that all of these scientists do in fact assume the principle that the Principia’s second (...) law asserts as a fundamental axiom in their mechanics. (For what that second law asserts, we rely on Newton’s own testimony.) Some, like Varignon and Hermann, assume the axiom implicitly, apparently unaware that any assumption is being made, while others, like Maclaurin and Euler, assume the axiom explicitly, apparently unaware that the assertion assumed is the second law as Newton himself understood it. But in every case these scientists employ the principle asserted by the Principia’s second law fundamentally, unaware that they should be citing Neutonus, Prin., Phil. Nat. Math., Lex II. (shrink)

The alleged conflict between religion and science most pointedly focuses on what it is to be human. Western philosophical thought regarding this has progressed through three broad stages: mind/body dualism, Neo-Darwinism, and most recently strong artificial intelligence (AI). I trace these views with respect to their relation to Christian views of humans, suggesting that while the first two might be compatible with Christian thought, strong AI presents serious challenges to a Christian understanding of personhood, including our freedom to choose, moral (...) choice itself, self-consciousness, and the relevance of God to our beginning, being, and ending. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the important role which an obligation to provide reasons can play in avoiding some of the systematic difficulties encountered in the theory of rational social choice. The paper builds on some of the insights offered by theories of structure-induced equilibrium. It argues that the obligation to provide reasons for certain choices, reasons which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the (...) space of possible choices "concept-sensitive" in a very useful way. Concept-sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the difficulties for achieving an equilibrium in social choice, difficulties which arise out of an excess of rational doing, are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent, of course, but because it is dependent on a choice path which "makes sense" (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept-sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitrary path dependent social choice which was of such concern to Kenneth Arrow in his original Nobel prize winning work. The paper illustrates its points with examples taken from the law. The law is a method of making social choices which emphasizes (in a very self-conscious way, and one which has no parallel either in politics or the market) the justificatory significance of the obligation to give publicly accountable reasons which attend to those issues arising in an ordered way out of a highly structured adjudicative process. Thus, the paper has as one of its ambitions the bringing together of two accounts of rational decision-making which, to this point at least, have not had much contact, namely, the theory of rational social choice and the theory of legal reasoning. (shrink)

The first proposition of the Principia records two fundamental properties of an orbital motion: the Fixed Plane Property (that the orbit lies in a fixed plane) and the Area Property (that the radius sweeps out equal areas in equal times). Taking at the start the traditional view, that by an orbital motion Newton means a centripetal motion – this is a motion ``continually deflected from the tangent toward a fixed center'' – we describe two serious flaws in the Principia's argument (...) for Proposition 1, an argument based on a polygonal impulse approximation. First, the persuasiveness of the argument depends crucially on the validity of the Impulse Assumption: that every centripetal motion can be represented as a limit of polygonal impulse motions. Yet Newton tacitly takes the Impulse Assumption for granted. The resulting gap in the argument for Proposition 1 is serious, for only a nontrivial analysis, involving the careful estimation of accumulating local errors, verifies the Impulse Assumption. Second, Newton's polygonal approximation scheme has an inherent and ultimately fatal disability: it does not establish nor can it be adapted to establish the Fixed Plane Property. Taking then a different view of what Newton means by an orbital motion – namely that an orbital motion is by definition a limit of polygonal impulse motions – we show in this case that polygonal approximation can be used to establish both the fixed plane and area properties without too much trouble, but that Newton's own argument still has flaws. Moreover, a crucial question, haunted by error accumulation and planarity problems, now arises: How plentiful are these differently defined orbital motions? Returning to the traditional view, that Newton's orbital motions are by definition centripetal motions, we go on to give three proofs of the Area Property which Newton ``could have given'' – two using polygonal approximation and a third using curvature – as well as a proof of the Fixed Plane Property which he ``almost could have given.''. (shrink)

I explore how the "synthesis of history and nature" that defines the Anthropocene might signal the advent of the “new mythology” Schelling hoped would emerge from his Naturphilosophie. The epistemological dimension of this new mythology is to be understood through Schelling’s idea of Mitwissenschaft, in which humanity is the essential active agent in the reflexive system of the world. Such an inquiry derives not from a sentimental longing for an enchanted world, but from the impending “annihilation of nature” Schelling foresaw (...) in 1804. The resulting organic episteme introduces a new realism in which nature, because absolute, becomes normative. (shrink)

One of America's foremost philosophers reflects on the discipline and its relation to everyday life.

Prolife theorists typically hold to the claim that all human beings possess equal moral status from conception and consequently possess a right to life. This, they believe, entails that abortion is impermissible in all circumstances. Critics characterize this as an extreme anti-abortion position, as it prima facie allows no exceptions, even in cases of rape. Here, I examine whether the prolife claim regarding equal moral status is compatible with a more attractive moderate stance that permits an exception in the case (...) of rape. I show that Judith Jarvis Thomson's analysis of rights can be used to modify the prolife position in this way, but that doing so involves concessions that prolife theorists are unlikely to find acceptable. (shrink)

Why do states who are committed to the principle of civilian immunity and the protection of non-combatants end up killing and injuring large numbers of civilians during their military operations? Bugsplat explains this paradox through an in-depth examination of five conflicts fought by Western powers since 1989.

Michel Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power has generated a large body of work in many different disciplines. Much of it has considered the paradox of the power of “each and all” or has seen pastoral power as an extension of the disciplinary gaze into welfare state policy. The political economy of the pastorate and the mutual dependence of sovereign and pastoral power, by contrast, are both relatively neglected. This article focuses on the exercise of pastoral power in a moral and (...) political economy and examines the “arts of government” through which the Catholic Church attempted to claim that pastors lived from the flock only to live for it. While there is heuristic value in Foucault’s diagram of pastoral power, in practice that power cannot be separated from class relations and political sovereignty. Empirical material is drawn from the novel attempt of Britain to govern its Quebec colony through the Catholic Church. (shrink)

Abstract.As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Newton entered into his ‘Waste Book’ an assumption that we have named the Equivalence Assumption (The Younger): ‘‘ If a body move progressively in some crooked line [about a center of motion]..., [then this] crooked line may bee conceived to consist of an infinite number of streight lines. Or else in any point of the croked line the motion may bee conceived to be on in the tangent.’’ In this assumption, Newton somewhat imprecisely describes two (...) mathematical models, a ‘‘polygonal limit model’’ and a ‘‘tangent deflected model,’’ for ‘‘one-body motion,’’ that is, for the motion of a ‘‘body in orbit about a fixed center,’’ and then claims that these two models are equivalent. In the first part of this paper, we study the Principia to determine how the elder Newton would more carefully describe the polygonal limit and tangent deflected models. From these more careful descriptions, we then create Equivalence Assumption (The Elder), a precise interpretation of Equivalence Assumption (The Younger) as it might have been restated by Newton, after say 1687. We then review certain portions of the Waste Book and the Principia to make the case that, although Newton never restates nor even alludes to the Equivalence Assumption after his youthful Waste Book entry, still the polygonal limit and tangent deflected models, as well as an unspoken belief in their equivalence, infuse Newton’s work on orbital motion. In particular, we show that the persuasiveness of the argument for the Area Property in Proposition 1 of the Principia depends crucially on the validity of Equivalence Assumption (The Elder). After this case is made, we present the mathematical analysis required to establish the validity of the Equivalence Assumption (The Elder). Finally, to illustrate the fundamental nature of the resulting theorem, the Equivalence Theorem as we call it, we present three significant applications: we use the Equivalence Theorem first to clarify and resolve questions related to Leibniz’s ‘‘polygonal model’’ of one-body motion; then to repair Newton’s argument for the Area Property in Proposition 1; and finally to clarify and resolve questions related to the transition from impulsive to continuous forces in ‘‘De motu’’ and the Principia. (shrink)