On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject (...) to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

Summary This essay focuses on a characteristic analytical and rhetorical strategy of the style of intellectual history practiced by Ian Hunter. It assesses the moral and political resources supplied by that strategy, as well as its implications for one particular humanities discipline, that of literary criticism.

Demography plays a large role in cultural evolution through its effects on the effective rate of innovation. If we assume that useful inventions are rare, then small isolated societies will have low rates of invention. In small populations, complex technology will tend to be lost as a result of random loss or incomplete transmission (the Tasmanian effect). Large populations have more inventors and are more resistant to loss by chance. If human populations can grow freely, then a population-technology-population positive feedback (...) should occur such that human societies reach a stable growth path on which the rate of growth of technology is limited by the rate of invention. This scenario fits the Holocene to a first approximation, but the late Pleistocene is a great puzzle. Large-brained hominins existed in Africa and west Eurasia for perhaps 50,000 years with, at best, slow rates of technical innovation. The most sophisticated societies of the last glacial period appear after 50,000 years ago and were apparently restricted to west and north-central Eurasia and North Africa. These patterns have no simple, commonly accepted explanation. We argue that increased high-frequency climate change around 70,000–50,000 years ago may have tipped the balance between humans and their competitor-predators, such as lions and wolves, in favor of humans. At the same time, technically sophisticated hunters would tend to overharvest their prey. Perhaps the ephemeral appearance of complex tools and symbolic artifacts in Africa after 00,000 years ago resulted from hunting inventions that allowed human populations to expand temporarily before prey overexploitation led to human population and technology collapse. Sustained human populations of moderate size using distinctively advanced Upper Paleolithic artifacts may have existed in west Eurasia because cold, continental northeastern Eurasia–Beringia acted as a protected reserve for prey populations. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age . I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions (...) of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community , and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the (...) role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Boyle on Occasionalism: An Unexamined SourcePeter Anstey*1. IntroductionThe question of Robert Boyle’s attitude to occasionalism 1 is central to our understanding of his corpuscular hypothesis, yet there has been little or no consensus in the secondary literature regarding Boyle’s attitude. 2 The doctrine of occasionalism is that matter is causally inefficacious and that God is the only causal agent in nature. It is a doctrine that was particularly attractive (...) to those Cartesian philosophers in the latter part of the seventeenth century who sought to find an active role for God in nature, for it both avoided the remoteness of the deist’s god and provided a ready explanation of the miraculous. Since Boyle was a mechanical philosopher, a Christian, and strongly influenced by Descartes, it seems likely that he too would have found occasionalism attractive; but there is no sustained discussion of occasionalism in his published works. It is therefore of singular importance that three folios in volume 10 of the Boyle Papers comprise a paper containing an explicit philosophical treatment of this doctrine. 3 It appears that Boyle considered these folios to be of sufficient importance to have them translated into Latin, perhaps to be circulated [End Page 57] among some of his non-English speaking acquaintances. Furthermore, this discussion of occasionalism is not simply of philosophical interest for its bearing on our interpretation of Boyle’s corpuscular philosophy, but it also has a degree of intrinsic philosophical interest in its own right. Moreover, the folios are of historical interest as a further important piece of evidence for the reception and dissemination of occasionalist ideas in Britain in the latter half of the seventeenth century. It is fitting therefore that they should be published.What follows is the reproduction of folios 38–40 from volume 10 of the Boyle Papers. This is prefaced by a short editorial introduction and is followed by a philosophical commentary, a short history of Boyle’s reception of oc-casionalist ideas and a review of recent interpretations of Boyle’s natural philosophy on the issue of occasionalism. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of Boyle’s philosophical method and method of work. This section attempts to resolve the apparent tension between the guarded defense of occasionalism offered in the folios published here and the incompatible doctrines espoused in Boyle’s published works.2. Editorial Introduction to Boyle Papers volume 10, folios 38–40In folios 38–40 of volume 10 of the Boyle Papers there is a sustained discussion of the thesis that “God himself is the only proper and immediate cause” among things corporeal. In Michael Hunter’s guide to the microfilm edition the folios are identified as a “[f]ragment of discourse discussing Cartesian views” and the reader is there referred to folios 42–46. 4 However, Edward B. Davis has correctly identified these latter folios as draft material for Boyle’s Final Causes. 5 Hunter has confirmed that the hand that wrote these reflections on occasionalism is that of A, an amanuensis who was in Boyle’s employment from c. 1680 and that some of the corrections are in the same hand. This is strong evidence that the passage was composed in the late 1670s or the 1680s. 6 The passage is written on a bifoliate followed by a single leaf linked to the former by a catchword. The hand is legible, and the pages contain only a small number of corrections. The passage itself consists of ninety-one lines. It is endorsed “A Fragment” in pencil, bears no title, and most likely was never completed. At one point Boyle tells us of the grounds of occasionalism that “there will be occasion to enlarge on them when I come to vindicate them,” something which he does not complete in the lines that follow. Rather the discussion comes to an abrupt halt after five and a half lines into the third folio. [End Page 58]Hunter has also identified a Latin translation of these folios in Boyle Papers, volume XXIX, folios 77–82v. The translation is in hand L, who has not been identified but who worked for Boyle in the 1680s. 7 It is... (shrink)

Recent research into human origins has largely focused on deducing past events and processes from current patterns of genetic variation. Some human genes possess unexpectedly low diversity, seemingly resulting from events of the late Pleistocene. Such anomalies have previously been ascribed to population bottlenecks or selection on genes. For four species of matrilineal whale, evidence suggests that cultural evolution may have reduced the diversity of genes which have similar transmission characteristics to selective cultural traits, through a process called cultural hitchhiking. (...) Cultural evolution is characteristic of human societies and so should be considered as a potential determinant of human genetic diversity. A stochastic simulation of gene and cultural dynamics in an array of hunter-gatherer tribes shows that cultural selection has the potential to severely reduce genetic diversity if: inter-tribe gene flows are reasonably low (<~0.6-15 genes/tribe/generation); cultural evolution changes fitness by >~0.3-3%/generation; and fitness is changed more by cultural innovation within a tribe than cultural assimilation from neighboring tribes. Thus cultural hitchhiking may explain low diversity and short coalescence times in mitochondrial and, especially, Y-linked human genes. (shrink)

This chapter examines the extent to which there are continuities between the cognitive processes and epistemic practices engaged in by human hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and those which are distinctive of science, on the other. It deploys anthropological evidence against any form of 'no-continuity' view, drawing especially on the cognitive skills involved in the art of tracking. It also argues against the 'child-as-scientist' accounts put forward by some developmental psychologists, which imply that scientific thinking is present in early (...) infancy and universal amongst humans who have sufficient time and resources to devote to it. In contrast, a modularist kind of 'continuity' account is proposed, according to which the innately channelled architecture of human cognition provides all the materials necessary for basic forms of scientific reasoning in older children and adults, needing only the appropriate sorts of external support, social context, and background beliefs and skills in order for science to begin its advance. (shrink)

What explains variation in hunting success? This paper examines foraging success among Inuit hunters, paying particular attention to factors that account for differential returns in hunting. Although there are several possibilities for explaining hunting success, this study finds that birth order and age are important predictors of foraging returns. Furthermore, data on food sharing suggests that birth order has important effects on the distribution of food. That is, early-born hunters not only produce more food, they give much of that food (...) to their parents, who then distribute it to the hunter’s younger siblings. These findings are discussed within the context of local resource enhancement and the value of early-born sons to Inuit parents. (shrink)

Polygyny does not necessarily entail sexual selection of men. All factors that affect the operational sex ratio must be considered. Data from contemporary hunter-gatherers indicate higher mortality rates in men than in women, and lost female reproductive time. If sexual selection did occur in ancestral hunter-gatherers, it was probably men selecting women and not women selecting men.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the (...) role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

This chapter examines the extent to which there are continuities between the cognitive processes and epistemic practices engaged in by human hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and those which are distinctive of science, on the other. It deploys anthropological evidence against any form of 'no-continuity' view, drawing especially on the cognitive skills involved in the art of tracking. It also argues against the 'child-as-scientist' accounts put forward by some developmental psychologists, which imply that scientific thinking is present in early (...) infancy and universal amongst humans who have sufficient time and resources to devote to it. In contrast, a modularist kind of 'continuity' account is proposed, according to which the innately channelled architecture of human cognition provides all the materials necessary for basic forms of scientific reasoning in older children and adults, needing only the appropriate sorts of external support, social context, and background beliefs and skills in order for science to begin its advance. (shrink)

Every human society has some code of behavior for its members. This is true of nomads and city-dwellers, of hunter-gatherers and of industrial civilizations, of Eskimos in Greenland and Bushmen in Africa, of a tribe of twenty Australian aborigines and of the billion people that make up China. Ethics is part of the natural human condition.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the (...) role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

The ratio of index- and ring-finger lengths is thought to be related to prenatal androgen exposure, and in many, though not all, populations, men have a lower average digit ratio than do women. In many studies an inverse relationship has been observed, among both men and women, between 2D:4D ratio and measures of athletic ability. It has been further suggested that, in hunter-gatherer populations, 2D:4D ratio might also be negatively correlated with hunting ability, itself assumed to be contingent on (...) athleticism. This hypothesis has been tested using endurance running performance among runners from a Western, educated, and industrialized population as a proximate measure of hunting ability. However, it has not previously been tested among actual hunter-gatherers using more ecologically valid measures of hunting ability and success. The current study addresses this question among Tanzanian Hadza hunter-gatherers. I employ a novel method of assessing hunting reputation that, unlike previous methods, allows granular distinctions to be made between hunters at all levels of perceived ability. I find no statistically significant relationship between digit ratio and either hunting reputation or two important hunting skills. I confirm that Hadza men have higher mean 2D:4D ratios than men in many Western populations. I discuss the notion that 2D:4D ratio may be the consequence of an allometric scaling relationship between relative and absolute finger lengths. Although it is difficult to draw clear conclusions from these results, the current study provides no support for the theorized relationship between 2D:4D ratio and hunting skill. (shrink)

Among hunter-gatherers, the sharing of male and female foods is often assumed to result in virtually the same diet for males and females. Although food sharing is widespread among the hunting and gathering Hadza of Tanzania, women were observed eating significantly more tubers than men. This study investigates the relationship between patterns of dental wear, diet, and extramasticatory use of teeth among the Hadza. Casts of the upper dentitions were made from molds taken from 126 adults and scored according (...) to the Murphy dental attrition scoring system. Females had significantly greater anterior occlusal wear than males when we controlled for age. Males exhibited greater asymmetry in wear, with greater wear on the left side in canines, first premolars, and first molars. We suggest that these sex differences in wear patterns reflect the differences seen in the diet, as well as in the use of teeth as tools. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Bookworms to Enchanted Hunters: Why Children ReadMaria Tatar (bio)Sensation SeekersThe laws governing the conservation of cultural energy are particularly effective when it comes to children’s literature. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Yearling, The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Snow Queen: these are just a few of the volumes that continue to pull and tug (...) on young readers, drawing them into enchanted other worlds. Their propulsive force has moved from one generation to the next, setting minds into motion, renewing senses, and almost rewiring brains. Favoring expressive intensity over intellectual heft, the books of childhood use no-holds-barred melodramatic strategies until we are under their spell. We can all remember the jolts and shimmer of books we read as children, the moments that sent shivers up and down the spine.“Wow” moments saturate children’s stories, exploiting the emotive power of language for maximum effect.1 Think of the multiple evocations of the web created by the spider Charlotte in E. B. White’s book, how it “glistens” in the light and makes a pattern of “loveliness and mystery.” “What a curious feeling,” Alice declares in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland once she has tasted the contents of a bottle marked “Drink me.” After that, the world she enters only becomes “curiouser and curiouser.” Dorothy lands in Oz and her eyes grow “bigger and bigger” at the “wonderful sights” she sees. They continue widening as she follows the Yellow Brick Road to Oz with her three companions. “A million golden arrows” point the way to Neverland, as the Darling children begin to experience the first in a series of bursts of beauty and rumbles of violence. Those rumbles create similar wow effects. Who can forget the moment when Iorek Byrnison, one [End Page 19]Maria Tatar Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology. She is the author of Classic Fairy Tales, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, and The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales and has written for the New York Times, the New Republic, and Slate.com.Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

What is the one big idea of Koselleck’s Historik understood as a methodological framework for the attempt to combine a theory of historical times with a theory of historical time? In part (1) of this paper, I criticize the two most basic attempts to understand Koselleck’s one big idea as mistaken because they are exclusively interested either in history (in the singular) or in histories (in the plural) and thus miss the central relevance of structures of repetition (“Wiederholungsstrukturen”) for Koselleck’s (...) Historik. In part (2), I will clarify the rather hidden pre-history, the main ambition, the theoretical context and the substantial content of Koselleck’s concept of structures of repetition in history and language. In part (3), I will discuss four historiographical consequences of Koselleck’s structures of repetition. I will end the paper by observing a remarkable theoretical affinity between Barrington Moore’s search for recurring patterns in the field of sociology and Koselleck’s structures of repetition in history and language. Moore’s work illustrates the historiographical potential of the one big idea of Koselleck’s Historik better than any other work I am aware of. (shrink)

This eye-opening read spans the foundations of ethics and key Buddhist concepts. Professor Peter Singer is a world-renowned moral philosopher and preeminent voice in bioethics whose writings have helped shape the animal rights and effective altruism movements. Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei of Taiwan is a Buddhist monastic and social activist who's been a key figure in the Buddhist gender equality movement. This unlikely duo came together in conversation at a meditation retreat center in 2016 and continued discussions in writing. They (...) shed light on the intersection of philosophy, religion, and day-to-day life. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Must We Shoot to Kill? Hunting in the Real World The Mastery of the Spectator and the Humility of the Hunter What Photography Cannot Capture Notes.

Susanne K. Langer (1895—1985) Susanne Langer was an American philosopher working across the analytic and continental divide in the fields of logic, aesthetics, and theory of mind. Her work connects in various ways to her central concerns of feeling and meaning. Feeling, in Langer’s philosophy, encompasses the qualitative, sensory, and emotional aspects of human experience. … Continue reading Susanne K. Langer →.