In this paper we study computability of the solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries equation ut + uux + uxxx = 0. This is one of the open problems posted by Pour-El and Richards [25]. Based on Bourgain's new approach to the initial value problem for the KdV equation in the periodic case, we show that the periodic solution u of the KdV equation is computable if the initial data is computable.

In this remarkable study, David A. J. Richards combines an interpretive history of culture and law, political philosophy, and constitutional analysis to explain the background, development, and growing impact of two of the most important and challenging human rights movements of our time, feminism and gay rights. Richards argues that both movements are extensions of rights-based dissent, rooted in antebellum abolitionist feminism that condemned both American racism and sexism. He sees the progressive role of such radical dissent as an emancipated (...) moral voice in the American constitutional tradition. He examines the role of dissident African Americans, Jews, women, and homosexuals in forging alternative visions of rights-based democracy. He also draws special attention to Walt Whitman's visionary poetry, showing how it made space for the silenced and subjugated voices of homosexuals in public and private culture. According to Richards, contemporary feminism rediscovers and elaborates this earlier tradition. And, similarly, the movement for gay rights builds upon an interpretation of abolitionist feminism developed by Whitman in his defense, both in poetry and prose, of love between men. Richards explores Whitman's impact on pro-gay advocates, including John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and André Gide. He also discusses other diverse writers and reformers such as Margaret Sanger, Franz Boas, Elizabeth Stanton, W. E. B. DuBois, and Adrienne Rich. Richards addresses current controversies such as the exclusion of homosexuals from the military and from the right to marriage and concludes with a powerful defense of the struggle for such constitutional rights in terms of the principles of rights-based feminism. (shrink)

The central thesis of Foucault's Critical Ethics is that Foucault's account of power does not foreclose the possibility of ethics; on the contrary, it provides a framework within which ethics becomes possible. Tracing the evolution of Foucault's analysis of power from his early articulations of disciplinary power to his theorizations of biopower and governmentality, Richard A. Lynch shows how Foucault's ethical project emerged through two interwoven trajectories: analysis of classical practices of the care of the self, and engaged practice (...) in and reflection upon the limits of sexuality and the development of friendship in gay communities. These strands of experience and inquiry allowed Foucault to develop contrasting yet interwoven aspects of his ethics; they also underscored how ethic practice emerges within and from contexts of power relations. The gay community's response to AIDS and its parallels with the feminist ethics of care serve to illustrate the resources of a Foucauldian ethics—a fundamentally critical attitude, with substantive (but revisable) values and norms grounded in a practice of freedom. (shrink)

Joy of a certain kind has an important affective role in demonstrating the overcoming of nihilism for Nietzsche. In this chapter I explore how one might arrive at a point where they too can give voice to Zarathustra’s proclamation that “all joy wills eternity.” There are consistent references to eternity and infinitude in passages of Nietzsche’s discussing nihilism. This is most obviously borne out in Nietzsche scholarship with reference to discussions of eternal recurrence. But eternal recurrence does not have a (...) monopoly for denoting Nietzsche’s employment of the motifs of eternity and infinitude. Eternal recurrence and its affirmation, I argue, is only a kind of end point for a process of overcoming nihilism. -/- My concern here is the manner in which Nietzsche employs these motifs to track three different stages related to nihilism. The first stage demonstrates an affective response of initial disorientation, which aims to engender a realization by the “marketplace atheists” that humanity must undergo the phenomenon of nihilism. Th e second stage documents an active confrontation with this phenomenon, which in turn offers deeper, more terrifying yet also more positive consequences of this realization, ones proffering new forms of freedom. The third stage is the constructive use to which Nietzsche sets these motifs in the service of life-affirmation, of which eternal recurrence plays an integral part. I examine several important passages using these motifs in Nietzsche’s mature writings, particularly from The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to claim that they inform a developmental process concerning the realization of nihilism and its overcoming. -/- I conclude by claiming that the motifs of eternity and infinitude’s employment at each of these three stages mirrors the substance of the “Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit” section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (shrink)

Legal theorists are familiar with John Finnis's book Natural Law and Natural Rights, but usually overlook his interventions in US constitutional debates and his membership of a group of conservative Catholic thinkers, the 'new natural lawyers', led by theologian Germain Grisez. In fact, Finnis has repeatedly advocated conservative positions concerning lesbian and gay rights, contraception and abortion, and his substantive moral theory derives from Grisez. Bamforth and Richards provide a detailed explanation of the work of the new natural lawyers within (...) and outside the Catholic Church - the first truly comprehensive explanation available to legal theorists - and criticize Grisez's and Finnis's arguments concerning sexuality and gender. New natural law is, they argue, a theology rather than a secular theory, and one which is unappealing in a modern constitutional democracy. This book will be of interest to legal and political theorists, ethicists, theologians and scholars of religious history. (shrink)

Therapeutic reactivity among psychology trainees was ascertained by their response to 10 clinical vignettes depicting clients with HIV who are sexually active with uninformed partners. This construct accounts for the relative change in decisions to maintain the confidentiality of clients who acknowledge safe versus unsafe sexual behavior. As anticipated, an analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect for safety and a significant 3-way interaction. Subsequent analyses revealed that trainees exhibit the highest level of therapeutic reactivity toward heterosexual male clients, (...) and the lowest reactive stance toward heterosexual female clients. Although the decisional pattern evidenced toward heterosexuals seems congruent with epidemiological estimates of risk, the decisions toward lesbians and gay males appear more likely a function of bias. The ethical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

In Nietzsche's Kind of Philosophy, Richard Schacht provides a holistic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's distinctive thinking, developed over decades of engagement with the philosopher's work. For Schacht, Nietzsche's overarching project is to envision a "philosophy of the future" attuned to new challenges facing Western humanity after the "death of God," when monotheism no longer anchors our understanding of ourselves and our world. Schacht traces the developmental arc of Nietzsche's philosophical efforts across Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, Joyful Knowing (The (...) Gay Science), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality. He then shows how familiar labels for Nietzsche-nihilist, existentialist, individualist, free spirit, and naturalist-prove insufficient individually but fruitful if refined and taken together. The result is an expansive account of Nietzsche's kind of philosophy. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for art in The Birth of Tragedy was so great that further reflection could only have tempered it—as it in fact did. The Nietzsche of the subsequently attached “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” is no longer the ardent “art-deifier” he sees himself as having been in BT. And as he indicates in an entry in his notebooks from the same period as this “Self-Criticism,” he had long since ceased to subscribe to the gospel of “Art and nothing but art!” (...) according to which art is “the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life.” Moreover, obviously thinking of this early work, he writes in the contemporaneous Fifth Book of The Gay Science that “initially I approached the modern world with a few crude errors and overestimations”—among which, he goes on to make clear, he numbers certain of his views with respect to art. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay explores recent trends and major issues related to gay and lesbian philosophy in ethics (including issues concerning the morality of homosexuality, the natural function of sex, and outing and coming out); religion (covering past and present debates about the status of homosexuality and how biblical and qur'anic passages have been interpreted by both sides of the debate); the law (especially a discussion of the debates surrounding sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and its impact on transsexuals, and whether the (...) law should be used to enforce morality); scientific research into the origins of homosexuality (including discussion of arguments against such research); and metaphysics (especially the question of whether homosexuality is socially constructed during particular times and in particular cultures, or whether sexual orientation is an essential trait cutting across times and cultures). (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentIn his latest book, David A. J. Richards extends his analysis of patriarchy and resistance, two of his most cherished themes, to the sphere of historical analysis. The Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at New York University School of Law here attempts to explore the relationship between these two ideas and the Western history of imperialism. He tries to show that one cannot fully understand the fall of legitimacy of the imperial ideal in (...) the twentieth century without taking into account the opposition against patriarchy that emerged out of a specific movement of resistance, the Bloosmbury Group.Richards devotes the first chapter of his book to demonstrate the thesis that the main feature of imperialism is its patriarchal nature. He does so by exposing the centrality of patriarchy in the Roman and British imperial models. While in the former the patriarchal culture structured both private and public life so as to render men profoundly violent and therefore unable to sustain its hegemonic. (shrink)