Many theistic philosophers conceive of God’s activity in agent-causal terms. That is, they view divine action as an instance of (perhaps the paradigm case of) substance causation. At the same time, many theists endorse the claim that God acts for reasons, and not merely wantonly. It is the aim of this paper to show that a commitment to both theses gives rise to a dilemma. I present the dilemma and then spend the bulk of the paper defending its premises. I (...) conclude with some suggestions for how one might carve out an alternative model of divine action. (shrink)

The idea that physical death may not mark the end of an individual's existence has long been a source of fascination. It is perhaps unsurprising that we are apt to wonder what it is that happens to us when we die. Is death the end of me and all the experiences that count as mine? Or might I exist, and indeed have experiences, beyond the time of my death? And yet, deep metaphysical puzzles arise at the very suggestion that persons (...) might continue to exist following physical death. Indeed, whether, and how, one can exist post-mortem will depend in no small part on what sorts of things we are and on what it takes for things like us to persist across temporal durations and other changes. These topics and their application to the growing collection of materialist accounts of resurrection are the focus of this Element. (shrink)

... four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years. Of the others, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Roscoe Pound, and Karl N. Llewellyn, ...

Abstract: William James argued that we ordinarily think of the objects that we can observe—things that belong to 'the world of sense'—as having an unquestioned reality. However, young children also assert the existence of entities that they cannot ordinarily observe. For example, they assert the existence of germs and souls. The belief in the existence of such unobservable entities is likely to be based on children's broader trust in other people's testimony about objects and situations that they cannot directly observe (...) for themselves. (shrink)

In the summer of 1997 one could scarcely enter a bookstore in Beijing without encountering Wang Xiaobo's pensive and defiant look on the cover of dozens of books displayed at the entrance. Wang had suddenly died in the spring of that year at the age of forty-five. Born in Beijing in 1952 to a family of intellectuals, he remained attached to China's capital despite periods of separation, such as during the Cultural Revolution, when he was sent to Yunnan to "learn (...) from the peasants" and taught in a "people-run-school" in Shandong, and also during the 1980s, when he studied in the United States . Wang always returned to Beijing, in the late 1970s to study economy and business at the People's University and in the late 1980s to teach there. After retiring in 1993, he devoted his time to writing: poetry, novels, essays, non-fiction, and a movie script. (shrink)

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. This article argues that the IOC policy on sex reassignment does (...) not operate to guard against discrimination and harassment against transsexual athletes but that it operates to maintain the popular illusion that there are two, binary gender designations. While both transsexual and Olympic bodies have unique histories and vastly different experiences in the social and political realms, using psychoanalysis we contend that the need to test gendered bodies is incited by an anxiety about bodily deterioration, aging, and, ultimately, mortality. (shrink)

STORY L, MAYFIELD‐JOHNSON S, DOWNEY LH, ANDERSON‐LEWIS C, YOUNG R and DAY P. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 373–384 Getting on Target with Community Health Advisors (GOTCHA): an innovative stroke prevention projectHealth disparities along with insufficient numbers of healthcare providers and resources have created a need for effective and efficient grassroots approaches to improve community health. Community‐based participatory research (CBPR), more specifically the utilization of community health advisors (CHAs), is one such strategy. The Getting on Target with Community Health Advisors (GOTCHA) (...) project convened an interdisciplinary team to answer the call from 10 counties in the rural Mississippi Delta area of ‘The Stroke Belt’ to meet the region’s identified health needs, and to impact the health of a disparaged state. This article explores this CBPR project including the community involvement strategies, innovative CHA training curriculum, evaluation plan, and implications to healthcare professionals, particularly nurses. (shrink)

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled America's ability to repay its debts abroad. Fear that the United States would abandon the gold standard sent the dollar plummeting on world markets. Without a central bank in the summer of 1914, the United (...) States resembled a headless financial giant. William McAdoo stepped in with courageous action, we read in Silber's gripping account. He shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. He smothered the country with emergency currency to prevent a replay of the bank runs that swept America in 1907. And he launched the United States as a world monetary power by honoring America's commitment to the gold standard. His actions provide a blueprint for crisis control that merits attention today. McAdoo's recipe emphasizes an exit strategy that allows policymakers to throttle a crisis while minimizing collateral damage. When Washington Shut Down Wall Street recreates the drama of America's battle for financial credibility. McAdoo's accomplishments place him alongside Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan as great American financial leaders. McAdoo, in fact, nursed the Federal Reserve into existence as the 1914 crisis waned and served as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Russell's Naturalistic Turn 37 INTRODUCTION L RUSSELL'S NATURALISTIC TURN RUSSELI.?S NATURALISTIC TURN NED S. GARVIN Philosophy I Albion College Albion, MI 49224 I Quine, Ontological Relativity (New York: Columbia U. P., 1969), p. 83. 1 Russell advocated this hypothetical acceptance of science much earlier, e.g., in AMa, pp. 398-9. Here we have many of the hallmarks of naturalized epistemology: (I) fallibilism, (2) the "best theory" account of science, (3) (...) the view that "knowing" is a natural phenomenon not confined to humans, and (4) the embedding of epistemology in behavioural psychology. But in 1940 Russell was a foundationalist (though an increasingly moderate one) who insisted that normative, or as he called it, "critical" epistemology must be distinguished from natural epistemology, and that critical epistemology is philosophically more important: "Within its limitations, theory of knowledge of the above sort is legitimate and In the nrst form of theory of knowledge, we accept the scientific account of the world, not as certainly true, but as the best at present available. The world, as presented by science, contains a phenomenon caIled "knowing", and theory of knowledge, in its first form, has to consider what sort of phenomenon this is. Viewed from the outside, it is, to begin with, a characteristic of living organisms, which is (broadly speaking) increasingly displayed as the organism becomes more complex. (Pp. 12-13)2 Both knowledge and error, at this stage, are observable relations between the behaviour of the organism and the facts of the environment. (P. 14) Quine argued that traditional justification requires non-scientific propositions that are more secure than scientific propositions, and we see there are none: science is providing the best account of the world and our knowledge of it. Though we abandon the attempt to justify science, we still attempt to understand it for nearly the same reasons that always motivated epistemology: "in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence".I Russell contemplated a naturalistic turn of his own in 1943, shortly after writing An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and nearly twentyfive years before Quine's landmark address. In the introduction to his Inquiry Russell claims that there are "two different inquiries, both important, and each having a right to the name 'theory of knowledge '" (IM~, p. 12). The first is recognizably natural epistemology: n.s. 11 (summer 1991): 36-S1.SSN 0036-016p ru•••II: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives McMaster University Library Press w. V. Quine's address to the Fourteenth International Congress of Philosophy in 1968, published a year later as "Epistemology Naturalized " in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, is a landmark of recent epistemology, marking the turn from traditional critical epistemology to a descriptive epistemology firmly embedded within natural science. I n 1943 Bertrand Russell wrote a little-known, three-page document he titled "Project of Future Work". It outlines the descriptive project of examining non-demonstrative inference that eventually becomes the focal point of Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. More remarkably, this document anticipates many salient features of naturalized epistemology, e.g., Russell argues that (I) an answer to scepticism is futile, we cannot justify scientific method; (2) the Humean Predicament arises from a traditional insistence on an unrealistic, demonstrative canon of justification; (3) non-demonstrative, fallible inference is already firmly embedded in scientific practice as a canon of inference, and should augment the demonstrative canon; and (4) the primary epistemic· problem is descriptive: in what circumstances does scientific method allow us to infer the existence of something unobserved from what we observe. These claims, in the wake of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, suggest that Russell was on the verge of his own naturalistic turn. I argue that, despite striking anticipations of naturalized epistemology, Russell develops his descriptive project within a more traditional, critical epistemic perspective. 38 NED S. GARVIN important. But there is another kind of theory of knowledge which goes deeper and has, I think, much greater importance" (IMT;., p. 14). Russell observes that behavioural psychologists omit that they are fallible observers, and this fallibility introduces doubt into their results. Further, naive... (shrink)

Intimate relationships between emotion and action have long been acknowledged, yet contemporary theories and experimental research within affective and movement neuroscience have not been linked into a coherent framework bridging these two fields. Accumulating psychological and neuroimaging evidence has, however, brought new insights regarding how emotions affect the preparation, execution, and control of voluntary movement. Here we review main approaches and findings on such emotion–action interactions. To assimilate key emotion concepts of action tendencies and motive states with fundamental constructs of (...) the motor system, we underscore the need for integrating an information-processing approach of motor control into affective neuroscience. This should provide a rich foundation to bridge the two fields, allowing further refinement and empirical testing of emotion theories and better understanding of affective influences in movement disorders. (shrink)

J. L. Austin, in "Ifs and Cans," proclaimed the common hope that we soon "may see the birth, through the joint labors of philosophers, grammarians, and numerous other students of language, of a true and comprehensive science of language." The problem has always been with the "joint labors" part. Philosophers have always been willing to issue linguists dictums and linguists have been happy to teach philosophers "plain facts." Austin’s general view of language, and his particular notion of performative utterance, can (...) be found in the writing of J. R. Firth, the most commanding British linguist of Austin’s generation, but Austin never refers to Firth. In the present volume, however, we find clear and exciting evidence of genuinely joint labors on the part of philosophers and linguists. They stem from a summer conference in 1969 rounded out with contributions from notables. To two thick issues of Synthese the editors have added a dazzling piece by Saul Kripke, two substantial pieces by James McCawley and J. R. Ross, a short paper by Paul Ziff, and a reprint of P. F. Strawson’s "Grammar and Philosophy." This is an invaluable book and the best book among the many now available concerning the interaction of linguistics and philosophy: worth the cost, which the contributors attempted to reduce through foregoing royalties. The philosophers in this volume hold, or hold intriguing, the view that the semantics of a natural language can and must, in effect, be a theory of truth for a language in much the manner that Tarski suggested, and provided, for artificial language: the recursive specification of biconditionals in which the left hand gives the structural description of an object language sentence and the right hand, the truth conditions in the metalanguage. In "homophonic" translation this requirement can be trivially satisfied simply by mentioning the sentence on the left that one uses on the right: one makes the requirement non-trivial by forcing enough into the recursive specification so that one captures the native speaker’s implicit semantic competence. In this volume, the "orthodox" Davidsonian program, which takes the syntax of the metalanguage to be standard predicate logic, is ably argued by John Wallace ; Richard Montague, David Lewis, and Jaakko Hintikka would want an intensional logic covering modality and propositional attitudes. The linguists who find this philosophical climate most appealing are called "generative semanticists": McCawley, Ross, George Lakoff and others argue that any proposed semantic rule will eventually prove necessary to syntax too and that, hence, the deepest level of syntactical form will be equivalent to semantic form. Whatever the ultimate fate of this joint program, it leads here to much exciting interaction between linguists and philosophers: linguists who welcome the machinery and conceptual standards of modern logic, and philosophers who try to grasp the specifics of crucial issues in recent linguistic theory. Even if Quine’s doubts, here sketched, and Chomsky’s currently unpublished more technical objections should be well-founded, nonetheless the joint labor will have been very much worthwhile. Aside from this general debate about semantics, there are several papers covering more specific issues. The papers of J. A. Fodor, Terence Parsons, and Ross concern adverbs and the logical form of action sentences; several papers, particularly B. H. Partee’s, examine "Opacity, Coreference, and Pronouns." In all these papers one notes the fulfillment of Austin’s hope that philosophic and linguistic arguments should become intermixed, if not at times properly indistinguishable. Perhaps the most enjoyable and exciting paper stands aside from linguistics: Saul Kripke’s "Naming and Necessity." Kripke here argues quite informally for the separation of analytic, a priori, and necessary that is required for a Kripke style, S5, modal logic with de re modalities. "Gold is a yellow metal," for example, turns out to be contingent, while "Heat is the motion of particles" is necessary but a posteriori ; and that philosopher’s stone of stones, "The morning star is the evening star," is discovered to be necessary but a posteriori.—J. L. (shrink)

In the summer of 2014, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the French 2010 law banning face-covering clothing in public spaces, the so-called burqa ban, did not violate the right to freedom of religion. Due to the ‘wide margin of appreciation’, the Court deemed the ban proportionate to the French state’s legitimate aim with the ban of preserving the conditions of ‘living together’. The paper analyses and provides an internal criticism of the Court’s justification for this judgement focusing (...) on the aim of living together and the right to freedom of religion. The Court’s justification presupposes that there is a justification for the ban in terms of the aim of living together, this is a legitimate aim and the ban is a proportional means of pursuing this aim. The paper analyses the Court’s justification and argues that it fails to substantiate all three conditions. (shrink)

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may (...) seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements. (shrink)

The Agent-Causal Theory of Action claims that an event counts as an action when, and only when, it is caused by an agent. The central difference between the Causal Theory of Action (CTA) and the Agent-Causal view comes down to a disagreement about what sort of item (or items) occupies the left-hand position in the causal relation. For CTA, the left-hand position is occupied by mental items within the agent, typically construed in terms of mental events (e.g., belief/desire pairs or (...) intentions). For the agent-causal theory, it is the agent herself (that is, a substance) which does the causing. Agent-causal theorists generally concede that some intentional actions involve causal relations that are best understood in eventcausal terms. Such intentional actions are "nonbasic," meaning that the agent does them by doing something else. But for any "basic" intentional action—behavior that, according to the agent-causal theorist, is caused directly by the agent—there is a causal relation between the agent, on the one hand, and the action, on the other, which is (i) primitive (not permitting of analysis) and (ii) irreducible to any other relation (including, importantly, the event-causal relation). (shrink)

Most philosophers concede that one can properly be held morally responsible for intentionally omitting to do something. If one maintains that omissions are actions (negative actions, perhaps), then assuming the requisite conditions regarding voluntariness are met, one can tell a familiar story about how/why this is. In particular, causal theorists can explain the etiology of an intentional omission in causal terms. However, if one denies that omissions are actions of any kind, then the familiar story is no longer available. Some (...) have suggested that this poses a special problem for causal theorists of action. I argue that it does not and, even more interestingly, that it renders a more nuanced understanding of voluntariness (since it no longer applies strictly to actions) and moral responsibility (since you might be to blame, but not for anything you’ve done). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guibert of Tournai's Letter to Lady Isabelle:An Introduction and English TranslationLarry F. Field, Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Guibert of TournaiIntroductionGuibert, from the noble family of As-Piès, was born near Tournai around 1200. From his hometown he traveled to Paris for his art degree, and completed the curriculum in theology there before entering the Franciscan Order around 1240. He may have participated in Louis IX's crusade of 1248, (...) but, if so, was surely back in Paris by 1254 at the latest, since he preached a cycle of sermons de dominicis et de sanctis to the university community before summer 1255.1 His regency as Franciscan master of theology at Paris was probably around 1259–1261,2 about the time he [End Page 31] completed his Eruditio regum et principum for Louis IX,3 and began his most substantial work, the Erudimentum doctrinae.4 Other significant treatises include his De pace et animi tranquillitate (ca. 1275)5 written for Marie de Dampierre, and the Collectio de scandalis ecclesiae, prepared for the Second Council of Lyon.6 Guibert died in Tournai on 7 October 1284.7Sometime around 1254, Guibert wrote a long letter of spiritual advice to Isabelle (1225–70), the sister of King Louis IX.8 Isabelle was herself a remarkable figure. She had rejected several proposals of marriage, including that with Conrad, the heir to Emperor Frederick II, in 1243, in spite of pressure from her family and Pope Innocent IV. But following a bout of serious illness at about that time,9 her family accepted her [End Page 32] decision to remain unwed. There is no evidence, however, that Isabelle ever pronounced a formal vow of virginity. Through the 1250s she simply remained at the Capetian court as a virgin princess with an increasing reputation for piety and indeed holiness, praised in lavish terms by Innocent IV in 1253 and Alexander IV in 1256.10 This piety took a distinctly Franciscan turn by 1254, when Pope Innocent IV granted her request for Franciscan confessors,11 which would ultimately result in her foundation of Longchamp, a house of Sorores minores just west of Paris, by 1260.12 Guibert's letter shows no awareness of such a project, indicating that it must have been written before spring 1255, by which time the land for Longchamp was being purchased on Isabelle's behalf.13 Guibert thus wrote at the moment when Isabelle was forming her first ties to the Franciscans, but well before her move to Longchamp, where she lived out the 1260s as resident lay patron (but never a nun).Guibert's Letter is really a short treatise of spiritual and moral advice, tailored to a celibate princess. It is organized around Psalm 44:14–15, All the glory of the king's daughter is within in golden fringes, clothed around with varieties. In a five-part structure, the king's daughter stands for a heavenly inheritance; glory within represents internal purity; gold indicates virginity; the fringes are a sign of humility; and clothed around with varieties points to honest comportment. The resulting "royal garment," however, is rather unequally woven together, with section one on the "heavenly inheritance" and the intertwined sections three and four on virginity and humility receiving by far the most space. In fact, section one forms a sort of treatise-within-a-treatise, organized as a ten-step ascent to the heavenly inheritance awaiting the daughter of the king. [End Page 33]The Letter to Lady Isabelle was first edited by Alphonse de Poorter in 1931, from a manuscript which contained only part of the text.14 The full text was brought into print by Sean Field in 2003,15 and translated into French by Jacques Dalarun in 2014.16 Yet in spite of these advances, the Letter has remained little noticed by scholars. Anne-Hélène Allirot offered several perceptive pages in 2010, stressing the way Guibert's treatment of hereditas implies that female members of the royal family might be particularly able to embody Capetian claims to holiness.17 That same year, in the only recent article dedicated specifically to this Letter, Rina Lahav... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Day I Touched JesusJeffery L. DealShe deserved better. They all do.I met her early on a morning that promised to be hot and wet, as Sudan tended to be at that time of year. Hot all the time. Hot and wet in the summers. I touched her for the briefest of moments, felt her leg move against my hand and caught a fleeting glimpse of a foot (...) that was barely the size of my fingertip. I was there because a missionary asked me to come, told me stories of conditions in Sudan and convinced me that I could save lives. He was right.Her twin brother was born eight hours earlier, sometime around midnight. The birth attendants managed the delivery as well as anyone could in the same situation. The last time I had attempted to manage such a problem delivery was almost twenty years earlier when I had been a Navy Lieutenant fresh out of my surgical internship on temporary assignment to a Marine Corps battle group in the Philippines. On that deployment, a corpsman brought me to a grass hut where a woman who looked barely more than a child herself labored against a breach delivery. I spent the day examining her while her family brought me things to eat that I do not believe should be eaten. After six hours of no progress, I radioed for a helicopter to take her to Clark Air Force base where they had operating rooms and obstetricians. In South Sudan, we had no such resources.My oldest daughter, a premed student at the time who had worked with me in Sudan on other occasions, sat in the corner with her classmates and watched as I put my hand inside the mother. She was of the Dinka ethnic group and was a large, robust woman who sweated profusely and occasionally caught her breath, but otherwise seemed unmoved by her contractions. Fluids gushed over my gloved hand and the students gasped. I felt the baby's leg retract slightly as if she resented my intrusion.I could not get past the baby's hip—she was wedged tightly in the uterus. I had some medicines that were used to hasten delivery and, not really knowing if it was the right thing to do, I gave the mother some through her IV. Still I could not dislodge the child. I told the students and birth attendants that we would give her one hour while I rounded on the other patients in our remote and poorly equipped clinic. If she did not deliver by that time we would take her to a facility run by a Catholic relief agency several hours drive from us—a drive that due to war, weather, or mechanical problems we could not always complete.I saw the rest of the patients in a hurry while browsing through all of the medical texts and the few books we kept at the clinic. This child's only hope of surviving was for her mother to have a cesarean section, and as quickly as possible. After determining that none of our other patients were in imminent danger, we loaded the mother, the first-born twin, and the grandmother into our vehicle for the long ride. One of the medical students, who at the time of this writing was completing her residency in obstetrics and gynecology, asked me if I shouldn't pray for the woman while we drove. I felt guilty for not praying out loud without being prompted, so I reached back and placed my hand on the mother's abdomen and prayed while I drove. I felt a slight movement. It could have been the rough road or the mother shifting, but I believe to this [End Page 81] day that I felt the child move. I would not feel her again. I drove as fast as the rough, bomb-cratered dirt road allowed.Mother and unborn child were doing well when we finally arrived three hours later. I knew the facility and many of the workers so I drove past the guard and directly to the obstetrics ward. Two nurses rushed out to meet us with... (shrink)

Conversions: A Philosophic Memoir belongs to the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau: the "confession" of a life that is a quest for truth. It is in large part the story of two major episodes from Abigail Rosenthal's early adulthood, bought putting personal identity dramatically at risk. As a young Fulbright scholar in Paris, Rosenthal met and entered reluctantly into a love affair with a young Greek communist philosopher who believed (along with many Parisian intellectuals of that era) that force and (...) deception were justified by a utopian vision of world history. In the inevitable collision of values—between Jew and Greek, liberal and revolutionary, theist and atheist, woman and man in unequal truggle—they separated. Suffering in the aftermath, she at last turned for help to a young African American woman graduate student whom she met in London. This woman's Gnostic Christian rejection of personal and cultural history eventually left Rosenthal without defense against her new mentor's remarkable use of charisma, ridicule, and moralistic reproach to usurp the author's life story. These stratagems of mind control reached a climactic phase in Portugal, where the two went—Rosenthal to paint the other woman to write—in what would turn out to be the terrifying reverse of a summer idyll. With the U.S. State Department, the Portuguese Policía Internacional devised an extraordinary rescue. This arresting narrative, which deals with relations between blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, and men and women, delivers its own philosophic theory of the individual in history. Author note: Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York and the author of A Good Look at Evil (Temple). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Poems Ancient and Contemporary HELAINE L. SMITH On the cover of Like: Poems by A. E. Stallings is a double photograph of a double image: two ancient carved heads, in profile and facing each other, of the pole horses of a quadriga, a four-horse chariot, dated about 570 BC, and currently in the collection of The Acropolis Museum. The marble horse in profile on the right side of the (...) cover, looking to the left, has a longer neck and face, and is undamaged except for a hairline crack at the neck. Its counterpart has a broader cheek, with light chipping above the nostril and an ear broken off. But they so mirror each other, they are so “like,” that at first glance one might suppose the photographs to be the right and left sides of the same horse. The bottom half of the cover of Like is an exact replica of the top, but the tinting is different, the heads in the top band cream-colored, in the arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Like: Poems by A. E. Stallings was published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Stallings’s earlier books of poetry include Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), and a verse translation of Lucretius’ The Nature of Things (2007). bottom a delicate ochre or sand. There is, then, on the very cover of Like a promise of complex correspondence and subtle variation within the volume itself. Stallings’s title suggests poetry as the art of locating and articulating likeness or as the act of finding one thing in another. And in Stallings’s delicate, robust, witty, and humane use of the past, “like” also and most significantly means that they—the figures of ancient myth—and we are alike in our shared experience and shared humanity. Stallings sometimes presents classical and mythological references glancingly, and that is part of the delight—catching the joke in Hermes’ epithet, “lord of florists,”1 finding in “The Rosehead Nail” that the local blacksmith in Monteagle, Tennessee, “was a god / Before... the tasks / That had been craft were jobbed out to machine.” Likeness is, of course, the mode of Homeric simile, and in “Selvage” Stallings turns the simile of Odyssey 22.468–73, in which Homer compares the hanged maids to thrushes caught in a net, into a different but contextually relevant parallel: “they hang... From the warp like a dozen ancient loom weights,” a likeness that evolves from Stallings’s double entendre in line seven describing the maids as “spinsters of their own doom,” an allusion both to the task, properly theirs, of weaving and to their disclosure to their lovers of Penelope’s secret unravelling. Stallings can expand as well as adapt Homeric similes. At Iliad 2.87–2.90 Homer likens the Achaians’ assembly at Agamemnon’s command to arm and attack Troy to bees leaving the hive: Like the swarm of clustering bees that issue forever in fresh bursts from the hollow in the stone, and hang like bunched grapes as they hover beneath the flowers in springtime fluttering in swarms together this way and that way so the many nations of men from the ships and the shelters along the front of the deep sea beach marched in order by companies to the assembly2 178 poems ancient and contemporary Homer finds likeness in the orderly setting forth—of bees, of men—to do what is required. This, on the other hand, is what Stallings does: Colony Collapse Disorder (Iliad, 2.87–2.90) Just as a swarm pours from a hollow rock In one long beeline for the wild thyme, Alighting in clusters on this purple and that, But is stricken with a mass amnesia That disorients the compass of the sun, And they forget the steps to traditional dances, And each helicopters into a different dimness Taking their saddlebags of sweetness with them, And the hive goes dark, the queen is left to starve, And the drones humbug the whimper of the world, And the palace falls to ruins, broken into By vandals who would loot the golden stores Left in the brittle wax hexameters, Just so... And “so” her... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Warn Me If I Approach the Melody” HELAINE L. SMITH In the 1950s on Saturday night TV, Sid Caesar performed comic sketches for a full hour. In one sketch Carl Reiner played Edward R. Murrow interviewing Caesar as the jazz musician Progress Hornsby. At a certain point Murrow asks Hornsby, “To what do you attribute your band’s great success?” and Hornsby answers, “Well, we have special equipment that warns (...) us if we get anywhere near the melody.” And so it must be with Nancy Worman and all those classicists who approach classics and literature as she does—special equipment to warn them whenever they get anywhere near a responsible reading of the text.* Her argument, cast in sentences whose words, like the amphisbaena, turn back on themselves or are unrecognizable as spoken or written English, boils down to (1) Greek men were colonialists and imperialists; (2) Greek tragedy celebrated men of this sort; (3) there arose, quite to the surprise and possibly to the consternation of its authors, women in their plays who were strong and violent rebels against the oppressive social order; (4) Virginia Woolf, whose feminism is not quite as pure as we’d like it, is not so bad after all because, if you look closely, pulling out the odd word here and there, decontextualizing it, inserting its decontextualized meaning elsewhere and mistranslating any Greek phrase that stands in your way, you discover—voila!—that she held views of Greece and Greek tragedy identical to those of radical feminism and shaped her novels, stories, and essays to reflect that view. Worman’s feminist audience, as familiar as it must be with feminist reception theory, would appear, from the unusual number of play summaries, elementary descriptions of the arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 *Nancy Worman, Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xii + 152 pages. $102.00. 150 “warn me if i approach the melody” origin and structure of Greek drama, and serious mistranslations in her book, to be unfamiliar with ancient drama, with basic Greek, and perhaps with Virginia Woolf as well. Her book has from such scholars received copious praise. But for those who begin less thematically burdened and who, as a colleague of mine liked to say, “worship at the altar of the text,” Worman’s methods turn scholarly inquiry on its head, not because of what they conclude, but because her conclusions are reached the same way the Queen of Hearts insisted trials be conducted: verdict first, evidence afterwards. Nor does Worman’s text have any discernible structure. Material within chapters bears fleeting connection to chapter titles and subheads. Points appear, vanish, and reappear, like the Cheshire cat, suggesting prior academic papers, here combined. This overall disorganization weakens the book, as does the non-linear quality of individual points. The organization of this review, therefore, is not thematic but chronological : it addresses those works of Woolf’s to which Worman gives attention, and presents them by date of publication. A Room of One’s Own appears nowhere in Worman’s text, and To the Lighthouse receives only minimal attention. Medea is nowhere mentioned in the favored categories of proto-feminist and fierce woman. While The Trojan Women and The Birds would both have served Worman well in arguing that Greek theatre reflected Athenian imperialism, they too make no appearance in her text. Instead, she casts Sophocles’ Electra and Antigone as fierce women and their plays, together with the Agamemnon, as emblematic of Athenian aggression and patriarchy. And so, in the forced nature of Worman’s translations and in the reductiveness of her assessment of Woolf, we see the consequences of a determination to bend texts to serve popular theories. “a dialogue upon mount pentelicus” (1906) woolf’s views of Greece reveal the complexity of great writing. Woolf frequently satirizes classicists who take their Helaine L. Smith 151 learning to be a sign of natural excellence, those for whom knowledge of Greek is simply a marker of position and rank. But for those who love such things for their own sake, or come to love them, as the tourists eventually do in “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus,” she... (shrink)

Fifty years ago this summer, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act was adopted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and approved by the American Bar Association. The UAGA has provided a sound and stable legal platform on which to base an effective nationwide organ donation system. The cardinal principles of altruism, autonomy, and public trust are still important. At a time when confidence and trust in our government and many private institutions has declined, maintaining trust and confidence (...) in our health care system and its commitment to “first, do no harm” has never been more important. Any policies that override these core ethical principles could cause irreparable damage to the public's faith in our transplant system. While progress has been made to increase organ registration and the number of organs transplanted, much more must be done to realize the potential of life‐saving therapy without jeopardizing ethical principles. (shrink)

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an (...) ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop ‘citizens’ for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation. (shrink)