These fifteen essays on Nietzsche's indebtedness to the Classical Tradition were composed by scholars in the fields of philosophy, theology, German and Classics. The essays roughly cover the following epochs: the age of the Fathers of the Western Church, medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism, Romanticism and the several other intellectual trends and movements in the nineteenth century. Collection includes three essays comparing Nietzsche's perceptions of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates with those (respectively) of Augustine, Aquinas, and Hamann. Three (...) essays treat Nietzsche's relationship to Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. Three deal with Nietzsche and French literature or thought, one explores possible parallels between Nietzsche and Dante, another the extent of his debt to Byron. Four contributions center on Nietzsche's view of tragedy, and an older study has been expanded to show the underlying harmony of Nietzsche's conception with that of the French classical tragedians. This book affirms and fulfills the need for serious scholarship by the student of Nietzsche unable to work in German, while presenting a readable cross-section of the work being done relating Nietzsche to the intellectual tradition from which he sprang. (shrink)

This richly suggestive book challenges many of our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our world."—Mark C. Taylor, New York Times Book Review "Dazzling analysis. . .

This collection of essays is a sequel to the editors' 1976 volume Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition. Philosophers, theologians, and literary historians discuss important aspects of Nietzsche's attack on Judaism and Christianity. The book contains studies of his view of biblical figures, Luther and Pascal as well as comparisons of his thought with that of Spinoza, Lessing, Heine, and Kierkegaard. Nietzsche's critique of the Old Testament, the Jewish religion of the diaspora, and historical Christianity are also investigated. Of (...) the eighteen articles included here, thirteen were prepared expressly for this volume--five were translated from German, one from French, and one from Hebrew. Contributors to this volume are: Eugen Biser, Harry Neumann, Israel Eldad, Charles Lewis, Jorg Salaquarda, Joan Stambaugh, Max L. Baeumer, Brendan Donellan, Diana Behler, Sander L. Gilman, Gerd-Gunther Grau, Josef Simon, James C. O'Flaherty, Bernd Magnus, Georges Goedert, Hans Lung, and Karl Barth. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of one of the most influential traditions in eighteenth-century Anglophone moral and political thought, 'theological utilitarianism'. Niall O'Flaherty charts its development from its formulation by Anglican disciples of Locke in the 1730s to its culmination in William Paley's work. Few works of moral and political thought had such a profound impact on political discourse as Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. His arguments were at the forefront of debates about the constitution, the judicial (...) system, slavery and poverty. By placing Paley's moral thought in the context of theological debate, this book establishes his genuine commitment to a worldly theology and to a programme of human advancement. It thus raises serious doubts about histories which treat the Enlightenment as an entirely secular enterprise, as well as those which see English thought as being markedly out of step with wider European intellectual developments. (shrink)

Intersectionality theory explores the special sorts of disadvantage that arise as the result of occupying multiple disadvantaged demographic categories. One significant methodological problem for the quantitative study of intersectionality is the difficulty of acquiring data sets large enough to produce significant results when one is looking for intersectional effects. For this reason, we argue, simulation methods may be particularly useful to this branch of theorizing because they can generate precise predictions and causal dependencies in a relatively cheap way, and can (...) thus guide future empirical work. We illustrate this point through models which show that intersectional oppression can arise under conditions where social groups are disadvantaged in the emergence of bargaining norms. As we show, intersectional disadvantage can arise even when actors from all social categories are completely identical in terms of preferences and abilities. The conditions necessary to derive such disadvantage are relatively minimal. And when actors behave in ways that reflect stronger intersectional identities, the potential for disadvantage increases. (shrink)

The first part of this two-part article suggested that William Paley’s Natural theology should be viewed as the culmination of a complex psychological strategy for inculcating religious and moral sentiments. Having focused in Part 1 on Paley’s rhetoric, we now turn our attention to the philosophical part of the programme. This article attempts to settle the vexed question of how far Paley responded to the devastating critique of the teleological argument contained in Hume’s posthumously published Dialogues concerning natural religion. It (...) also identifies tensions that arose in Natural theology between the rhetorical and intellectual sides of the stratagem. In response to Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary theories, Paley asserted that the divinely designed architecture of nature had remained unchanged since the creation. But the more he emphasized the preordained nature of providence, its effectuation through mechanical dispositions, the less room there appeared to be for particular interventions. Section 2 concentrates on Paley’s efforts to reconcile this model of a law-governed, mechanical universe, with the belief in a personal God who was active in worldly affairs. It therefore challenges the view, long unquestioned in the historical literature, that Paley’s Deity was merely a watchmaker, who had remained idle since the Creation.Keywords: William Paley; Natural theology; David Hume; Watchmaker. (shrink)

The paper aims to assess the theory of mind of sexual offenders. We administered to 21 sexual offenders and to 21 nonoffenders two classical first- and second-order ToM tasks, a selection of six Strange Stories, and a semi-structured interview, the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale , which provides a multi-dimensional evaluation of ToM, investigating first- vs. third-person and egocentric vs. allocentric perspectives. Results show that sexual offenders performed worse than controls on second-order ToM tasks, on Strange Stories and on each (...) of the Th.o.m.a.s dimensions, whereas they did as well as the control group on first-order ToM tasks. A detailed analysis of participants’ performance on Th.o.m.a.s. showed that sex offenders performed worse on the third-person than on the first-person ToM scale, and worse on the allocentric than on the egocentric perspective; these findings did not apply to the controls. Implications for future research and treatment are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sharon O'Dair FREELOADING OFF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES In Profession 89, published by the MLA, Martin Mueller complains that the fashion for interdisciplinary work in literary studies is mostly an intradepartmental affair. In English departments interdisciplinary work results not in cross-fertilization between disciplines but in the establishment ofsubdisciplines within English. To support his assertions, Mueller focuses on the efforts of new historicists, most of which, he claims, would not pass (...) muster in history departments orjournals.1 But literary critics who import from sociology or psychology can be arraigned on the same charge; seldom do they engage sociologists or psychologists in the way envisioned by Mueller, that is, intensely. Ifthey did, the subdisciplines would not be defined as narrowly as they are; Marxism would not dominate our sociology of literature and psychoanalysis would not dominate our psychology of literature. If they did, critics would better understand the norms of science and thus be less likely to appropriate terms and theories for use outside the specialized arenas for which they were designed. And, to anticipate my conclusion, critics might then be less likely to further what psychologist Liam Hudson calls his discipline's "psychic engineering." My concern with how literary critics use social science results from grappling with the problem myself. Like most critics, I used to be rather uncritical in my borrowings from social science, figuring that ifit works, it works, and being, no doubt, somewhat off-put by the notion of "science." But as I read sociology and psychology on the problem of the self/subject, I became troubled by the way science structures discourse on the problem ofthe selfor subject and its relationship to surrounding environments. What do these discourses include and leave out? What are their boundaries? What is the status of the images of men and Philosophy and Literature, © 1991, 15: 260-267 Sharon O'Dair261 women offered by them? These are questions thatought tobe addressed by literary critics, but seldom are. To be more specific: although literary critics borrow heavily from the social sciences, most notably, of course, from those derived from the work of Marx and Freud, we do not often acknowledge the limits of the scientific discourses from which we borrow. Sociological "man" (the alienated role-player)—like psychological "man" (one pushed by drives and molded by stimuli) or economic "man" (the rational optimizer)— is an abstract and artificial description, a construct, useful as a tool in scientific analysis. As such, homo sociologicus or homo psychologicus maintains heuristic strength, but neither is intended to capture the whole of a human being or to account for the entirety of determining and enabling influences on him or her. Neither is a philosophy of human nature, and certainly neither was offered by social scientists to account for the creations of Kafka or Shakespeare. Ralf Dahrendorf has observed that "man in his entirety not only is safely removed from the attack ofany single discipline, but may possibly remain forever a nebulous shape in the background of scientific endeavor."2 Generalizing that point, Kenneth Burke explains that "insofar as any science has a nomenclature especially adapted to its particular field of study, the extension of its special terms to provide a definition in general would necessarily oversociologize, overbiologize, overpsychologize, or overphysicize, etc., its subject."3 So, in general, the social sciences, like the physical sciences from which they draw methodological inspiration, aim not to describe reality but to construct categories that allow each social science to capture a certain part, and only a certain part, ofreality in analysis. To get on with thejob, the sociologist controls for the fact of individuality—what is personal or unique in human beings—just as to get on with thejob, the psychologist controls for the fact ofsociety—what is social in human beings. Each discipline simplifies its notion of a person to proceed as science. As an object of study in much social science of this century and the last, a person is necessarily quite different from a person one meets on the streets, in a city or town. To the sociologist, then, if I may focus my argument, the person is nothing but his or her social roles. Erving Goffman, therefore... (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues that (...) the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

I analyse the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that have given rise to persistent political disputes about race (known colloquially as “the culture war”) among a subset of Americans. I argue that they point to a deep tension between widely held normative aspirations and pervasive and readily observable material facts about our society. The characterological pathologies this gives rise to are discussed, and a normatively preferable path forward for an individual attempting to reconcile themselves to the current social order is (...) suggested. (shrink)

Is there a limit to the legitimate demands of morality? In particular, is there a limit to people's responsibility to promote the well-being of others, either directly or via social institutions? Utilitarianism admits no such limit, and is for that reason often said to be an unacceptably demanding moral and political view. In this original new study, Murphy argues that the charge of excessive demands amounts to little more than an affirmation of the status quo. The real problem with utilitarianism (...) is that it makes unfair demands on people who comply with it in our world of nonideal compliance. Murphy shows that this unfairness does not arise on a collective understanding of our responsibility for others' well being. Thus, according to Murphy, while there is no general problem to be raised about the extent of moral demands, there is a pressing need to acknowledge the collective nature of the demands of beneficence. (shrink)

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how (...) mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject. (shrink)

An examination of the specifically graphic-novelistic strategies employed in Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir, Maus, in leading the reader into a punctuated experience of time and memory, and in forcing complicity with the novel's problematic animal-as-ethnicity metaphor, in a wider attempt at putting together the critical vocabulary for discussing comic books as simultaneously textual and pictorial ‘texts’.

O debate teológico presente no Stift de Tübingen é campo de recepção da filosofia kantiana por meio de uma questão específica: aquela da existência de Deus e de Sua revelação aos homens. Reconstruindo-o tangencialmente, pode-se sublinhar qual a posição que a filosofia kantiana ocupa nele, salientando-a frente àquela de Storr e Flatt. Também, apontar para a apropriação dela no seio daquele debate. Assim, quando se volta para a posição de Hegel, nota-se que ele se contrapõe à apropriação teológica de Kant, (...) posicionando-se de modo similar ao kantiano. Tem-se aqui um liame entre Kant e aquilo que se chama, incipientemente, de filosofia hegeliana. (shrink)