Feminists surely cannot be blamed for having one or two differences with a philosopher who compared women to plants in their intellectual powers, denied that they were capable of the higher activities of art, science, and philosophy, and warned that when “women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.” Undoubtedly, in some of his texts Hegel made patently ridiculous (...) and offensive statements about women. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in their zeal to attack the prejudice that Hegel on occasion displayed, some feminists have overlooked much of the subtlety of his philosophy. Ignoring the larger context of his arguments, they have instead myopically focussed on particular phrases and moments in his thinking which seem to be easy targets. (shrink)

We aimed to identify the critical insights from empirical peer-reviewed studies on online romance fraud published between 2000 and 2021 through a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The corpus of studies that met our inclusion criteria comprised twenty-six studies employing qualitative (n = 13), quantitative (n = 11), and mixed (n = 2) methods. Most studies focused on victims, with eight focusing on offenders and fewer investigating public perspectives. All the (...) victim-focused studies relied on data from the Global North, except for Malaysia. Five offender-focused studies used online data available in the public domain, and three derived their data from West Africa. Our review highlights offenders' techniques to deceive and manipulate victims, as revealed in these studies, and highlights some limitations of offender- and victim-focused studies. The dominant framework used across the studies was found to be the “Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model.” While this framework provides a helpful way of considering the stages of victim involvement, it also faces some limitations, which we highlight. Our study reviews the current state of empirical knowledge on romance fraud and identifies certain gaps and biases in the literature. We argue there is a need for further research into online romance fraud to enhance our understanding of it both from the perspective of the offender as well as the experience of the victim. We also highlight the need for a more inclusive and greater range of regional and global diverse range of data sources and perspectives. Given the scale and impact of online romance fraud, we conclude that its study would benefit from a richer empirical engagement that recognizes it as both a regional and global phenomenon. (shrink)

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city (...) and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself. (shrink)

At Pech Merle in 1952, André Breton provoked a controversial incident by damaging a Palaeolithic wall painting that he suspected to be a fake. This episode provides an insight into the contested status of prehistoric sites in post-war France and the theoretical and ideological implications of their cultural mobilization. Such sites allowed for a disavowal of wartime trauma and supported the reaffirmation of French national identity and its civilizing mission by locating the birthplace of human culture on French soil. Yet (...) their extreme age also threw into relief the relative fragility of the recently invented nation-state. Breton's vandalism cast doubt on the models of cultural progress and pre-eminence that sought to instrumentalize prehistoric art but failed to appreciate the subversiveness of its ‘deep’ history. Ironically, however, Breton's scepticism ultimately enhanced the subversive dimension of archaeology by allowing it to demonstrate the authenticity and age of cave art. (shrink)

As technology continues to grow (and sex-robots gain a more prominent position in our society), so too does concern about the way they will impact our lives and our sexuality. While many ethicists have started to assess what this impact could be (and if it would be positive or negative), the challenges and opportunities presented by sex-robots span over a wide range of topics and cannot be assessed easily. Hence, in this paper, I will attempt to categorize the main questions (...) concerning the ethics of sexual robotics in order to help ethicists gather their thoughts on this new technology. While doing so, I will principally identify four overarching issues: (1) how robots’ representation of human sexuality affects human gender issues; (2) how robots could potentially be utilized for medical purposes; (3) if robots could possibly deceive their users; (4) if sex-robots could end up as a new form of sex-slaves. (shrink)

Stuart Swindle in “Why Feminists Should Take the Phenomenology of Spirit Seriously” accuses me of failing to interpret the passages in the Phenomenology on the family and women in the full context of the progress to absolute spirit. He gives no particular evidence for this claim, but merely asserts it repeatedly and at an ever increasing decibel level. To this general criticism I assert that nothing that I wrote in “Has Hegel Anything to Say to Feminists?” denied that spirit progresses (...) beyond the Hellenic world or any other particular stage of development. In fact, my argument was predicated on just such a development. Women, however, - I argued - do not seem to develop, nor are they capable of development, in their consciousness or social expression according to Hegel from Greek times to modernity. (shrink)

Cinema and the automatic sweetheart. The work of art as an automatic sweetheart. Automatic sweethearts without names: the place of films in the world of art -- Cinema and new realism. Realism and trasparency in film. What is new in realism? Cinema, philosophy and the rediscovery of reality -- Cinema and documediality. The movie theatre of Babel. Toward a new ontology of film. The digital secret of the moving image -- Cinema and the ontology of the cell phone. (...) Double signature. An ontology for mobile movies. Film me, stupid. On Eco on mobile phones and stupidity -- Cinema and animality. Humans, animals, machines. Anthropocentrism and science fiction cinema. (shrink)

Fanatics judge a lottery with a tiny probability of arbitrarily high value as better than the certainty of some modest value, and they are prone to getting swindled. You need only make the lie “big enough” to get one over on them. I put forward an elegant solution to the fanatic’s problem. When coming to a fully rational decision, agents may ignore outlandish possibilities.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE GREAT GATSBY: ROMANCE OR HOLOCAUST? Thomas J. Cousineau Washington College In an otherwise appreciative response to The Great Gatsby, H. L. Mencken expressed a reservation about the plot ofthe novel, which he characterized as "no more than a glorified anecdote" (Claridge 156). Writing to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald suggested, in turn, that what Mencken did not find in Gatsby was "any emotional backbone at the very height of it" (...) (Turnbull 342). Critics ofthe novel, however, have tended to overlook the self-evident fact that the novel's ostensible emotional center—the reunion between Gatsby and Daisy—does not possess sufficient significance to justify the classic status that has been largely accorded to Fitzgerald's novel. We need only remember Daisy's effusive appreciation ofGatsby's "beautiful shirts," or the even more telling detail that the truly "romantic" moments in Daisy and Gatsby's relationship all occurred several years earlier in Louisville and that the period of the reunion is scarcely mentioned in the novel to convince ourselves that the putative grandeur of Gatsby's dream does not adequately account for the novel's power or its lasting significance. Reading Gatsby as a novel about its hero's dream makes of it, in fact, a precarious literary achievement, one whose numerous absurdities were perceptively delineated by the English novelist L.P. Hartley, who admired Fitzgerald's literary gifts but thought that he had squandered them in Gatsby. In a 1926 review of the novel, Hartley offered the following summary of its plot: An adventurer of shady antecedents builds a palace at a New York seaside resort, entertains on a scale which Lucullus would have marveled at but could not have approved, and spends untold sums ofmoney, all to 22Thomas J. Cousineau catch the eye ofhis one time sweetheart, who lives on an island opposite, unhappily but very successfully married. At last, after superhuman feats ofostentation and display, the fly walks into the web. A train ofdisasters follows, comparable in quantity and quality with the scale ofthe Great Gatsby's prodigies of hospitality. Coincidence leaps to the helm and throws a mistress under a motor-car. The car does not stop, which, all things considered, is the most natural thing that happens in the book. An injured husband finds the Great Gatsby in suicidal mood sitting on a raft in his artificial lake and (apparently) forestalls him; anyhowthey are both discovered dead. The elder Gatsby is unearthed and gives a pathetic account ofhis son's early years. All the characters behave as though they were entitled to grieve over a great sorrow, and the book closes with the airs oftragedy. (Claridge 178) Minor inaccuracies aside, this must be among the most cogent, disabused responses that the plot of The Great Gatsby has ever received. It is such a welcome antidote to the reams of interpretation ofthe novel produced by critics who, dutifully aping Nick Carraway in this respect, have allowed their conviction as to Gatsby's "greatness" to be matched only by their equally adamant certainty as to the moral tawdriness of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. As Hartley's exasperated summary reminds us, The Great Gatsby, read as the account ofthe eponymous hero's dream, simply cannot support the weight of morally serious interpretation that it would like to invite or that so many ofits critics, in their turn, would like to bestow upon it.1 Nor do we move any closer to appreciating the greatness of Gatsby by shiftingourattention tothe growth in moral awareness thatcountless critics have attributed toNick Carraway, whose self-evaluation as "one ofthe few honest people that I have ever known" (64) should in itself arouse our suspicions.2 As we shall see, the fruits ofNick's presumed moral education The seemingly indestructible resistance to Hartley's lucidity that has been displayed by the great majority ofthe novel's critics may be observed in the chapter that Jeffrey Hart devotes to Gatsby in his recently published Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe. Arguing that "magical transformation" is the novel's true subject (230), Hart credits Nick with achieving an "epiphany" whereby he recognizes Gatsby's superiority to "the whole damn bunch put together" (238) and concludes that the larger... (shrink)

This article refers to the main features of contemporary criminality in Lithuania. The period of analysis of those main features is 2004-2011. From 2004, a period of stable state registration of criminality, i.e. a period without significant changes in criminal laws commenced. The article deals with the analysis of spreading criminality in Lithuania, and the main socio-demographical features of persons charged with criminal offences. The registered number of criminal offences in 2011 decreased by about 15%, compared to 2004. The largest (...) decrease was recorded in 2007. Yet during the economic crisis, after 2007, the number of registered criminal offences slightly increased, however, as has already been mentioned, the registered number of criminal offences in 2011 was 15% less. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that the changes in criminality came two-three years after certain social changes, in this case – the economic crisis. The characteristic features of the contemporary criminality in Lithuania are: the tendency of decrease in violent crimes (homicides, rapes, serious bodily injuries). During the researched period, the number of homicides decreased by 39%, of serious bodily harms – by 56%; and of rapes and attempts – by 26.5%. Another tendency is the decrease in property crimes. The most widespread property crime is theft. The registered number of thefts decreased by 25%. Among them, the registered number of car thefts decreased the most – by 65%; and the decrease of domestic burglaries amounted to 55.5%. The registered number of robberies decreased by 53%. During the researched period, destruction of or damage to property and swindling – their registered number – increased by 80% and 92% respectively. In the countries with much more developed market economy than in Lithuania (e. g. in Scandinavian countries), the indicators of those crimes are 2 to 3 times higher. This means, firstly, that in future the number of those crimes in Lithuania will increase; secondly, the decrease in violent crimes and the increase of swindling means that market economy in Lithuania has become more developed than before. In Lithuania, the number of persons charged with criminal offences during the researched period tended to decrease, but not much, only by 12%. Some socio-demographic characteristics of persons charged with criminal offences are: juveniles make up 15%; traditionally, they are men, but in contemporary criminality in Lithuania we observe a small (only by 3%) increase of women; the increase in the number of persons aged from 18 to 24 is observed, and it seems that the socio-economic situation of this age group has become more complicated; during the economic crisis in Lithuania, the number of unemployed and not studying persons increased significantly (up to 60% in the structure of all registered persons charged with criminal offences) and almost reached a problematic situation that existed during the transitional period from socialist economy to market economy, from totalitarian society to democratic society (before 2000). (shrink)

PART 9: GRAVITY'S ETHICSThis isn't a hospital! It's an insane asylum! And it's your fault! Shaking her head lightly, Doctor Van Tintelen leaves the room and softly closes the door. Empathy streaming through her veins, she never gets used to the unpolished grief of a patient she has to tell of inevitable death, never. She thinks, “There should be pipes to drain the tears in every room, or at least rinsing basins for grief. What a job.” The crying is that (...) of the sisters Barrio. Miranda and Monica are twins who always refer to themselves as M&M. Though Monica cries the hardest, it is Miranda who was just told that her breast cancer has spread into her liver. No more treatment available.“Don't cry, Monica, I took the risk purposely. We both knew breast cancer runs in our family. You had the test, I didn't.”“And now you see the result, Miranda, you are going to die. We aren't even fifty yet. Damn.” The irony is that the clock in the room doesn't work, its pointers silent and stiff.“Do you really think you are better off? I've never completely understood why you had the preventive double mastectomy.”“I have never felt less of a woman. You know that.”“I know, but some men felt differently about it.”The remark hurts Monica almost physically, and Miranda apologises immediately. “Sorry, sweetheart, I shouldn't have said that. The sisters embrace for the hundredth time.”“Maybe I was too much of a coward,” Miranda says, resigned, “or too proud of my breasts.” For a second she lifts the big breasts sadly with her hands. Cynically: “After all, they were my trumps in eroland.”“A coward? You? How about me?” Monica seems to calm down somewhat. “I was too afraid of the continual fear …. (shrink)

The most notorious and celebrated forger of the twentieth century, Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), was born in the Dutch town of Deventer. He was fascinated by drawing as a child, and pursued it despite his father’s disapproval, sometimes spending all his pocket money on art supplies. In high school he was able finally to receive professional instruction, and went on to study architecture, according to his father’s wishes. In 1911 he married Anna de Voogt. His artistic talents were recognized when (...) he soon after won first prize and a gold medal from the General Sciences Section of the Delft Institute of Technology for a drawing of a church interior. He agreed to sell this drawing, but was discovered by his wife making a copy of it to sell as the original. She dissuaded him from carrying out this small swindle, but the incident is the first evidence of an interest in faking, even if in this case the artist was merely forging his own prize-winning work. (shrink)

We live in a time of crisis. Economic crisis, ecological crisis, refugee crisis. Scholars talk about the end of history, the end of politics, the end of nature, the end of the world as we know it. Racism and neo-fascism are on the march pretty much all over the Western world; Mexican children are torn away from their parents at the US border; temperatures are rising everywhere ; islands of microplastic accumulate in the Pacific, and the latest news: Europe’s taxpayers (...) have been swindled of €55 billion, as revealed by the so-called #CumExFiles.1So the old question bears repeating: What is to be done? Or, perhaps more accurately... (shrink)

The first two-thirds of Stuart Swindle’s article, “Why Feminists Should Take the Phenomenology of Spirit Seriously,” amounts to little more than rhetorical misogyny: “Those poor feminists, trapped in ‘the little stories’ of the Hegelian system, unable to see for themselves that what is really important is Hegel’s ‘big story.’ Why those poor creatures, those feminists just cannot see the forest for the trees! How could they be so small-minded: trying to turn such monumental philosophy into “an activists’ handbook”! On top (...) of that, they are so haphazard in their work. Really, their lack of seriousness is just too much to bear!”. (shrink)

Wherever there is life, there are lies. Slick-suited politicians lie on the podium, ready to tell voters what they want to hear. Cheating lovers, swindling businessmen, double-crossing villains – all liars. But nature lies too – the cheetah crouching in the tall grass waiting to pounce, its spots and straw-coloured fur blending in with its surroundings, the chameleon with its adaptable skin, the octopus hiding in its cave. Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel uncovers the slippery history of lies, some dark and elusive, (...) others thunderous and dazzling. From primeval forests to modern politics, he explores the uncomfortable truths of our white lies, fudged facts and blatant deceptions. For centuries, philosophers, writers and poets have grappled with the paradox of what’s fact and what’s fiction. So who can we really believe? Our friends? Our partners? Our leaders? Can we even trust ourselves? Truly, this is the only book in which the abundance of lies on its pages is a sign of success. Or maybe it isn’t. Who can really tell? (shrink)

We began by…implying a comparison between Duchamp and the swindlers; we lately find ourselves . . . implying a comparison between Duchamp and the child. I believe that in the end both comparisons are essential to a thorough understanding of Duchamp's significance; it is also, however, essential that each comparison temper and qualify the other. The swindlers begin and end as aliens to the community on which they practice their art. Duchamp is as much inside the artworld as is the (...) child inside his community. On the other hand, Duchamp is not disenfranchised, as is the child, though, like the child, he is innocent of certain illusions typical of full enfranchisement. Like the swindlers, and unlike the child, Duchamp is full of guile. He pointedly produces something ambiguous, something which supports diametrically opposed readings, depending on where one's bets are placed. One of the readings amounts to a critique of the other reading as a hoax. But unlike the swindle, whose effectiveness depends on the degree to which the critique remains hidden and the hoax enjoys full rein, Duchamp's gesture is effective, as is the child's unambiguous announcement, to the degree that the critique embarrasses the hoax. It seems, then, that Duchamp embodies some rare and interesting combination of guile and innocence which the fable keeps apart by dividing them between agents whose activities are at cross-purposes. The limitation of the fable as an analogy is that it provides no model for the combination. The fable contains the figures of the swindler, of the gullible mark, and of the observer so innocent as to be incapable of duplicity. What we are confronted with in Duchamp is the figure of the wise guy.Joel Rudinow, a conceptual artist, created a multimedia satire entitled Higher Learnin'; or, The Song and Dance of Socrates: In Which the Love of Wisdom Leads to the Discovery that the Unlived Life is Not Worth Examining. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Hannah Baker Saltmarsh This Girl I Lost Touch With This girl, who was afraid to enter a room— a girl born in the woods, on moss, whose family dreamt under quilts, who wore dresses that matched anything fabric in the house, even the dresses without loneliness— I held her hand in the corridor-dark until the speaking-in-tongues at (...) the community college dispersed into prayers with too many gerunds and too much fervor that wouldn’t adjust if you got a thousand dollars in the mail or jury duty, faith subtle as a crucifix the size of God on the highway. I waited with her until it was over, although the prayer group was never really over. Over rooms of crowded, faith-based humidity, she loved corridors of woods, the rushes of running away. This girl and I, we were cult-lured, but then the leader stepped down—was it porn, alcohol? He drove us around in a red jeep without doors— the first time I drove in a man’s car, I was eighteen so I fell in love: looking straight ahead together, arm hair touching, the cathedral of autumn anticipating a shape to hold you, the wind that you sometimes hollered over. What happened I can’t see, but when he left the group, I left: the death of visions. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh 95 This girl could long for a man in her fingernails, and, without talking, take a man from his pregnant wife’s side, have his even newer children, this girl who wouldn’t go in a room all alone, walked right in, somewhere we’ve not been, and never left. Monostich in Praise of Four Missed Foul Shots in a Row, Ending with a Line by Shaquille O’Neal —Orlando Magic vs. Houston Rockets, Game 1, NBA Final, 1995 Each mistake at the foul line longs to be its own distinct trip-up, divorced from the tragic-comic failure automatic-reflex of a protagonist on a shame-rampage; each delicate flaw of glass, net, rim wants to be denied once at the charity line, once and only once of red-lipsticked points, the naive purity of one aberrant error in calculation—not bring bleacher-crowds to their feet, posterless hands in the vaulted air before tallying Nick Anderson up as Brick Anderson, most hated NBA player of all time, and by his own fans not believing their own eyes as a series of empty arcs toward scoring dovetails into quadruple humiliations and a goofy smile of gutted hopes and boyish fear-tangled awe that any brain so practiced (for this and what else?) could fail so many times in a row, each fail better and Beckett-harder until the last exit out of obliterating loss is part of the abyss too, unless you are quick on your feet for sports broadcasting... but there is no end to swindled championships if you are a man who’s never had to face the extinction of his early twenties or suck the aftertaste of multi-millionaire juice cocktails poured with a legend’s touch, but in the soapy-sweet glass of your Dixie cup liquor, however close to the sound of Shaq’s name spoken in every language, stares your same lovesick reflection in the welt of that shot-glass mirror, mouthing the bitters of paranoid distraction, unripe manhood, aged ingratitude, and a starless Orlando Magic blue diamond broomed over by nursery-rhyme witches brushing out the cobweb-haze because the crowd is always the same crowd calling you swept... each fumbling error of pressure you let get to you, if only it could be a plotless, lyric monostich without arc, not driven to the plot that is your grave, where the unfaithful, the murderers, liars, and cheaters are defined by threads, no, snapped pieces, of seconds and, as Dante would have it, sorted in hell by a singular thought or deed so 96 Hannah Baker Saltmarsh transformative as to name you; the blue and white jersey on the floor, fists and feet, knees and elbows vacuumed in tantrum, hyped up in the court glare and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 220-223 [Access article in PDF] Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like Care, by John McWhorter; xiv & 279 pp. New York: Gotham Books, 2003, $26.00. In 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks was marked in New York City by the reading of the Gettysburg Address. It was, as many commentators noted, an (...) odd choice of eulogy, comparing as it did the unwitting and innocent victims of a terrorist attack to the willing and active [End Page 220] participants in a bloody civil war. In Doing Our Own Thing, the Berkeley linguist John McWhorter asserts that this strange choice was the result of a decline in American public discourse. A "particular kind of artful English, formerly taken for granted as crucial to legitimate expression on the civic stage has" he argues, "virtually disappeared" (p. xiv). For McWhorter, this lack of contemporary public oratory is merely part of a broader linguistic decline that has affected all aspects of American life and culture.There has, he suggests, been a dumbing-down of the language. Whereas Americans once took care to craft their language, public and private, McWhorter argues, there is now a casualness to their speech and writing which affects all aspects of their existence. The nature of this decline is best captured by McWhorter's anecdote about his research into Gullah, an obscure Creole dialect. In response to his inquiries about local speech patterns, an elderly black woman in Greenwood, Mississippi responded: "Well, seems like most folks, they speak pretty good English, but some people, it seems like they just talk" (p. 2). Whereas Americans once spoke pretty good English, McWhorter believes, now, for the most part, they just talk. In Doing Our Own Thing, he seeks to identify not only evidence for his thesis, but also the causes and consequences of this decline.Evidence of linguistic decline is, McWhorter believes, to be found in our public discourse (as evidenced by the contemporary use of the Gettysburg Address), and in the rise of rap music and popular lyrics at the expense of poetry—he notes that as late as the 1960s, the poet Marianne Moore was a guest on The Tonight Show twice. Less intuitively perhaps, he identifies the same decline in the decreased popularity of piano bars, and the rising popularity of cell-phones. What all these examples of have in common, McWhorter suggests, is a turn towards an oral as opposed to a written culture. Speech has, he says, become something of a "dress-down affair" (p. 49), and this has infected both our written word and public oratory. The "modern American speech writer" he notes, "tends strongly to operate under a guiding imperative not to sound too high a note" (p. 47). McWhorter contrasts this with examples from the nineteenth-century—with letters from ordinary soldiers to their sweethearts, and with Edward Everett's two-hour plus address at Gettysburg—which show that "we live in an America with a distinctly different relationship to the English language than an America still within living memory" (p. 167).For McWhorter, the causes of this decline are clear. The 1960s counterculture, in its efforts to "Speak Truth to Power, abandoned the formal conventions of previous generations' speech, and adopted its own more casual approach to public discourse. Indeed, McWhorter feels confident enough to identify "a single year when America lost its love for its language": 1965 (p. 183). The consequences of this decline are, for McWhorter, similarly obvious. Among them, the shift to an oral culture is held to be responsible for: the election of George W. Bush—Al Gore's "studied articulateness is certainly one of the major [End Page 221] factors that blocked him from winning the presidency" (p. xxi); the decline of contemporary political debate—more formal written language is, says McWhorter, "a better vehicle for objective argument than speech" (p. 35); and the increasingly obtuse nature of academic language. Indeed, McWhorter asserts that Judith Butler... (shrink)

Love, fear, hope, calculus, and game shows-how do all these spring from a few delicate pounds of meat? Neurophysiologist Ian Glynn lays the foundation for answering this question in his expansive An Anatomy of Thought, but stops short of committing to one particular theory. The book is a pleasant challenge, presenting the reader with the latest research and thinking about neuroscience and how it relates to various models of consciousness. Combining the aim of a textbook with the style of a (...) popularization, it provides all the lay reader needs to know to participate in the philosophical debate that is redefining our attitudes about our minds. Drawing on the rich history of neurological case studies, Glynn picks through the building blocks of our nervous system, examines our visual and linguistic systems, and probes deeply into our higher thought processes. The stories of great scientists, like Ramon y Cajal, and famous patients, like Sperry's split-brained epileptics, illuminate the scientific issues Glynn selects as essential for understanding consciousness. Some might argue that his lengthy explorations of natural selection overemphasize evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, but they must also agree that evolutionary psychology has distanced itself mightily from social Darwinism in recent years and merits a reappraisal. The great consciousness debate may form the core of the 21st-century Zeitgeist; get ready for it with An Anatomy of Thought. -Rob Lightner From Publishers Weekly How do we know? What do we think? How could a philosophical problem-'the mind-body problem,' say-induce a headache? What can evolutionary theory, molecular biology, the history of medicine and experimental psychology tell us about the features of human consciousness, and (once again) how do we know? Glynn, a physician and Cambridge University professor, meticulously attempts to answer these questions and more, setting forth the results of all sorts of research relevant to our brains-from 19th-century dissections to Oliver Sacks-like case studies, work with monkeys and supercomputers, and the enduring puzzles of philosophy, which he rightly saves for near the end. After explaining evolution by natural selection and 'clearing away much dross,' Glynn lays out the experiments and theories that have shown 'how nerve cells can carry information about the body, how they can interact' and how sense organs work; demonstrates the 'mixture of parallel and hierarchical organization' in our brains and 'the striking localization of function within it'; considers where neuroscience is likely to go; and admits that, among the many fields of exciting research just ahead, 'we can be least confident of progress toward a complete, scientific explanation of our sensations and thoughts and feelings.' Other recent explaining-the-brain books have sometimes advanced simplistic, or implausibly grand, claims about the nature and features of consciousness in general. Instead, Glynn offers a patient, informative, well-laid-out researcher's-eye view of what we have learned, how we figured it out and what we still don't know about neurons, senses, feelings, brains and minds. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The nature of consciousness, which perennially troubles the minds of scientists and philosophers, is the subject of an ever-growing body of literature. Two of the latest entries approach the topic from different perspectives. Glynn, a professor of physiology and head of the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge, offers a comprehensive summary of what we know about the brain-both its evolution and its mechanisms. Among the topics he covers are natural selection, molecular evolution, nerves and the nervous system, sensory perception, and the specific structures responsible for our intellect. Using the mechanisms involved in vision and speech as models, Glynn skillfully describes various neurological deficiencies that can lead to 'disordered seeing' and problems with the use of language. He carefully distinguishes what we know through experimental evidence from what we know through the observation of patients with neurological damage. He also describes some of the major theories that attempt to explain why these structures arose. While his book concentrates on the structures that make up the mind, Glynn is well aware that some physical events appear explicable only in terms of conscious mental events-a situation that conflicts with the laws of modern physics. Only briefly, however, does he consider the various approaches that have been taken to deal with the issues of mind/body and free will. In contrast, this is the primary focus of The Physics of Consciousness. After reviewing the fundamentals of classic physics, Walker (who has a Ph.D. in physics) summarizes elements of the new physics in which our knowledge of space, time, matter, and energy are all dependent on the moment of observation. Walker explores the meaning of consciousness as a characteristic of the observer. In this context both the observer and the act of measurement are critical. In essence, Walker leads his reader on a journey through his concept of a 'quantum mind,' which can both affect matter (including other minds) and can be affected by other distant matter/minds. To break up what would otherwise be an extremely dense text, Walker also relates the very touching story of the loss of his high-school sweetheart to leukemia. Indeed, it is his memory of their relationship that drives Walker to seek an understanding of ultimate reality. At times, he has a tendency to be dogmatic-as when he concludes, 'our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind.' While An Anatomy of Thought is appropriate for most academic libraries, the Physics of Consciousness will be most accessible to readers with some knowledge of advanced physics. -Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The codiscoverers of natural selection-Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace-disagreed over the possibility of finding an evolutionary explanation for the human mind. Glynn here argues Darwin's side of the debate, tracing an eons-long path of development starting from simple amino acids floating in primal seas and extending through the erect hominids in which the powers of a massive brain first manifest themselves. Patiently adducing evidence of an evolutionary origin for the underlying molecular machinery, Glynn dissects the nerve centers that make possible speech and hearing, sight, and reading. Pressing deeper, he lays bare the cortical foundations of personality. But those who deal with the mind must attend also to the arguments advanced by philosophers. And it is when he turns from dendrites to syllogisms (especially the vexing mind-body paradox) that Glynn's empirical reasoning fails him. In the end, he concedes his perplexity in trying to conceive of an evolutionary origin for human consciousness. This concession may set the shade of Alfred Wallace to chortling, but it will draw readers into an honest confrontation with a profound enigma. Bryce Christensen. (shrink)

Correspondence to: John Harris The Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, Institute of Medicine Law and Bioethics, School of Law, University of Manchester, Williamson Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 0JH, UK; [email protected] and Culyer1 have written an interesting and considered response, as people intimately connected to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence , to the two editorials that I wrote on recent NICE decisions. Before commenting on their response, I would like to consider a point they made, which (...) echoes a point already made by Rawlins and Dillon,2 about the tone of my editorials. Claxton and Culyer accuse me of making “personally abusive charges”. In my original editorial, I criticised an institution, NICE, in robust terms, but in doing so I was continuing a long and respected tradition in English philosophy. Consider the following extract from Jeremy Bentham:" In English law, fiction is a syphilis, which runs in every vein, and carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness...Fiction of use to justice? Exactly as swindling is to trade...It affords presumptive and conclusive evidence of moral turpitude in those by whom it was invented and first employed.3"My remarks were not an ad hominem criticism of anyone but directed at the published, but anonymous statements of an institution—a body corporate. In robustly criticising NICE, I no more attacked any individual associated with NICE than I attacked Tony Blair or the various ministers of state who are ultimately responsible for NICE. And, contra Claxton and Culyer’s claims, I have not denigrated the views of people who beg to differ from me.i If the apologists for NICE, whether they are Tony Culyer or Tony Blair, choose to identify themselves with criticism of NICE, that is entirely a matter for them. The only ad hominem remarks in this entire exchange have been made by Rawlins and Dillon, and Claxton and Culyer. The idea that criticism of the anonymously authored publications of …. (shrink)

1. I have fond memories of the Linguistic Society of America meeting in New Orleans just after Christmas in 1988, the last time I was able to see all my humanist friends from graduate school who were attending the concurrent meeting of the MLA. Shortly after that, the LSA decided to forego the company of humanists and assemble by itself during the first week of January. It's hard to fault the decision. Over and above the obvious practical advantages, like not (...) having to wait in line for forty-five minutes outside popular restaurants, the groups had been growing apart intellectually for some time. Few linguists bothered to cross town for MLA sessions on topics like onomastics, English usage, and the history of lexicography. Nor for that matter were those sessions drawing many MLA attendees, either. Literary people didn't seem to be much interested in language study anymore; what filled their ballrooms now were the sessions on deconstruction and other poststructuralist enthusiasms. It was like going back for your annual drink with your high-school sweetheart and finding that you had less and less to talk about. They didn't know what subjacency was and we didn't know what alterity was, and neither seemed to care. If you were of a mind to look for milestones, you could take that as the time when linguistic semantics definitively cut itself loose from its philological roots. Like a lot of semanticists, I had mixed feelings about the break. It's undeniable that linguistic semantics couldn't have come of age as an autonomous empirical discipline if it hadn't.. (shrink)

The interest shown in marginal groups is explained by a diversity of factors. On the threshold of the modern era appeared an abundant literature devoted to a description of the world of delinquency. More particularly, these were treatises on the mysteries of the forbidden quarters of the cities of the time and on the behavior and way of life of social groups living by swindling or fraud. This being drawn to the exotic and the unusual in society, which was not (...) unrelated to an awakening of ethnological curiosity, was also seen in the flowering of a type of literature which could be called “picaresque.” It had already appeared in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, but it came into full bloom only in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Spanish picaresque novel, because of its literary brilliance and its wide acceptance by the reading public, left in the shade a multitude of similar works coming from other European countries, from the English “rogue pamphlets” to the “rogue” literature of Germany and Holland to the tales of Polish and Czech vagabonds. These literary works are closely related to treatises which claimed to be based on eye-witness accounts or which claimed to report authentic events. In reality, they were all taken from fiction and demand comparison with documentary evidence. But the abundance of this type of literature and the success it enjoyed also indicate an early awareness by modern society of the growing importance of social groups living in contradiction to the norms, manners and customs in force at the time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Poetry And MetaphysicsJoseph BottumIWe ought to begin with what is true: things stand over against us—over against philosophers, over against poets, over against us all. The sheer existence of a thing, the mute unspeakable “it” of it, is as impossible of being thought as it is of being said. Things confront us, always other; the other has no other face.Of course, the problem with trying to begin this way (...) is that language shies as soon as we begin. By existence, we mean the this (utmost concreteness, utmost particularity), while words speak of ideas, verba mentis, thoughts, abstractions. Philosophers and poets alike hear the swindle when we use the most abstract language—“being,” “thing,” “existent,” “this”—to speak of what is most concrete, the most general to speak the most particular. It is precisely because “Being” sounds so generic that Aristotle must insist Being is no genus. 1And skittish thought shies here as well. Just as language throws us when we come to speak the real, so thought slips sideways and refuses when we come to that same hurdle in the thing. What advance is made when the unthinkable is recognized as unthinkable? We certainly hold no infinite thought when we understand we cannot think the infinite; we do not grasp our death by understanding we cannot imagine being dead. So we miss somehow the thing and catch instead our thinking when we suppose unthinkability belongs to the unthinkable thing. Only in misdirection can we point to that with which we must begin. Logic might have warned us: there can be no answer to the question “What is this?” when what we mean by this is what is left when all the whats are stripped away. But our resistance to the real is not merely from the sort of logical contradiction that makes square circles or mountains without [End Page 214] valleys impossible to think. Though we know it is wrong to take resisting as an intention of the thing, nonetheless behind the passion that is our own being resisted we feel what seems to be an action of the other: the something-there for which thought itself does not account.We know, in other words, that existence is not a form, but we can only think existence as though it were some sort of form—the attempt to describe which leads us further and further from the existence we are trying to describe. Language is insufferable. Through the window I see my neighbor Mr. Wheeler over there across the lawn, raking while his daughters fill the dark green plastic bags with leaves. Between us and the real, a gap persists—though “persists” is not the word I need; we lack the words to posit a negation. The Wheelers have a birch tree in their yard, with half its strangely splayed yellow leaves still clinging on. The twigs and branches all point up; the leaves and autumn catkins all hang down like tatters that on the indifferent tree, turned inward for the winter, no longer notices. The stiff curls of parchment bark, the black scars in the white along the trunk, the—all of this is failure. I cannot create with words the tree, the unspeakable angle, color, shape, the overwhelming all-at-once thingness of it here now, existence. Reaching out with words to touch the tree, I am betrayed: the word “tree” barely stirs, “birch” just begins stretching out, but every word beyond them either breaks the thing apart to smaller things (the scarred trunk, the yellow leaves) or breaks off in abstraction.The failure of language to speak the real is a failure of language. My capacity to call it a failure, however, comes not from language but from my conviction (while I see the birch) that the real exists. “There are two principles which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them,” writes David Hume, “that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.” 2 Because we encounter no things that are what they are, no existing essences, the sheer existence of a... (shrink)

‘I know the future is scary at times, sweetheart. But there’s just no escaping it’. Ernest Cline, Armada As I sit here on Planet Zoom during the global COVID-19 pandemic and try to figure out how t...

Overgeneralization -- Vague definition -- Post hoc, propter hoc -- False analogy -- Partial selection of the evidence -- Groupthink -- Scams, deceptions, ruses, swindles, hoaxes and gaslights -- Begging the question -- The logic of Alice.

Bernoulli’s 1713 golden theorem is viewed retrospectively in the context of modern model-based frequentist inference that revolves around the concept of a prespecified statistical model Mθx\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{M}}_{{{\varvec{\uptheta}}}} \left( {\mathbf{x}} \right)$$\end{document}, defining the inductive premises of inference. It is argued that several widely-accepted claims relating to the golden theorem and frequentist inference are either misleading or erroneous: (a) Bernoulli solved the problem of inference ‘from probability to frequency’, and thus (b) the golden theorem (...) cannot justify an approximate Confidence Interval (CI) for the unknown parameter θ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\theta$$\end{document}, (c) Bernoulli identified the probability PA\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$P\left( A \right)$$\end{document} with the relative frequency 1n∑k=1nxk\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\frac{1}{n}\sum\nolimits_{k = 1}^{n} {x_{k} }$$\end{document} of event A as a result of conflating f(x0|θ)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$f({\mathbf{x}}_{0} |\theta )$$\end{document} with f(θ|x0),\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$f(\theta |{\mathbf{x}}_{0} ),$$\end{document} where x0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf{x}}_{0}$$\end{document} denotes the observed data, and (d) the same ‘swindle’ is currently perpetrated by the p value testers. In interrogating the claims (a)–(d), the paper raises several foundational issues that are particularly relevant for statistical induction as it relates to the current discussions on the replication crises and the trustworthiness of empirical evidence, arguing that: [i] The alleged Bernoulli swindle is grounded in the unwarranted claim θ^nx0≃θ∗,\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hat{\theta }_{n} \left( {{\mathbf{x}}_{0} } \right) \simeq \theta^{*},$$\end{document} for a large enough n, where θ^nX\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hat{\theta }_{n} \left( {\mathbf{X}} \right)$$\end{document} is an optimal estimator of the true value θ∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\theta^{*}$$\end{document} of θ. [ii] Frequentist error probabilities are not conditional on hypotheses (H0 and H1) framed in terms of an unknown parameter θ since θ is neither a random variable nor an event. [iii] The direct versus inverse inference problem is a contrived and misplaced charge since neither conditional distribution f(x0|θ)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$f({\mathbf{x}}_{0} |\theta )$$\end{document} and f(θ|x0)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$f(\theta |{\mathbf{x}}_{0} )$$\end{document} exists (formally or logically) in model-based (Mθx\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal{M}}_{{{\varvec{\uptheta}}}} \left( {\mathbf{x}} \right)$$\end{document}) frequentist inference. (shrink)

Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic account of sibling rivalry, fluctuating between narcissistic identification and fear of annihilation, also applies to Walter Benjamin’s model of true love in his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This model is found in the utopian novella “The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts,” inserted within Goethe’s novel. By reducing the relationship between the novella and its framing narrative to an opposition between truth and semblance, Benjamin replicates in his reading the specular logic that is love’s obstacle. On (...) the other hand, Freud’s analysis of an episode in Goethe’s autobiography can be said to retroactively operate what Mitchell calls “lateral castration,” for Freud compares the great writer to patients in analysis and thus establishes the necessary seriality that creates “space for one who is the same and different.” Still, and although elements of his own autobiography facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, Freud exempts Goethe’s sisters from the position of rivals. Recognising “the sister” as earliest playmate, and object of hatred and narcissistic identification, like Mitchell does, might be the first step necessary for drawing a model of love for women as peers this side of utopia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:240 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Mary Anna Evans Mary Anna Evans Personal Continuum The scent of gasoline is neither attractive nor repulsive. It falls somewhere on the continuum between. It is medicinal, but without the acrid bitterness of medicine. It draws children like a drug, but only when their parents aren’t hovering to warn of danger. Adults know about fire and poisoning and long-range carcinogenic (...) doom. Children only know that the odor around gas pumps smells naughty and fun, until their lips open and the flavor of petroleum turns their stomachs. Why do some things smell so much better than they taste? Gasoline, unlike honey, draws humans but not flies. Sarah was not thinking of fire, poisoning, or doom when she fitted the long metal nozzle into the mouth of her car’s fuel tank. She was trying not to think at all, though the customary thoughts slipped in. None of them were about gasoline. The pump’s air pollution control system was working well but not perfectly, so it took a moment for the odor to reach her nose. Her body roused and snarled at her. The baby. What are you thinking? If you breathe those fumes, what will they do to the baby? A moment passed while her body checked itself, remembering what it already knew. There was no baby. Where is the baby? Mary Anna Evans 241 The frantic voice didn’t echo between her ears. It had nothing to do with her brain at all. It was more than thought. It came from a place deeper than thought, and it wasn’t hers. Her body said things she didn’t want to say, and it needed things she didn’t need. Her body wanted things that were not good for her. Again, Where is the baby? And then, the darker question. What did you do? “Nothing,” she said aloud, since there was no one to hear. I didn’t do anything but bleed. I’m still bleeding. She resisted the instinct to clap her hands over her ears to shut out the voice that couldn’t be shut out. Her defiant hold on the nozzle kept her upright. She listened to the rhythmic throb of the pump. Refusing to turn her face from the gasoline’s stench, she opened her mouth and let the fumes seep in. * * * “Hello, sweetheart,” Frederick said as he came in the door. His peck on the cheek didn’t linger, so Sarah knew there would be no more expressions of affection that day. He had read in a self-help book that it was important for couples to use terms of endearment as a form of bonding. Physical displays of affection were important, too, or so said the self-affirmed relationship expert who wrote the book. In public, displays of affection affirmed the pair bond. In private, even a quick smooch forced men and women to secrete an attachment chemical called oxy-whatever. Oh, hell. She was a chemist. She knew what oxytocin was. She was just mystified by the notion of reading a book to find out how to get some. He turned away and went into the kitchen to fetch the marinating chicken. He always grilled when it was his night to cook. She had come to wonder whether modern men were drawn to cook with fire by an ageold hunter instinct, or whether they were attracted to an activity that put a well-insulated exterior wall between them and the women who remained inside to toss the salads. All across America, every warm summer night, lonely women toss salads and hope for romance. His head poked in the back door. “I bought slivered almonds and croutons.” 242 Mary Anna Evans Her “Thanks for remembering, sweetheart,” bounced off the closing door. Shit. She could have spared herself that soulless term of endearment. Leaving the lettuce in the refrigerator, she thrust her soapy hands under warm running water, because even thinking the word “shit” made the idea of handling raw food appalling. Her body, which had forgotten again that she’d lost the baby, approved of her caution. She guarded her thoughts against disturbing its... (shrink)

Despite worries about the fairness of lotteries or the sources of the human psyche’s strong attraction to them, Americans have made lotteries a part of their civic lives. The popularity of gaming does not, however, gainsay the unease many Americans feel about state sponsorship of lotteries. The debates that surrounded the introduction of lotteries remain to this day, but the arguments are tired and the camps deadlocked. One camp argues that a lottery is simply a properly randomized drawing that determines (...) who among a freely chosen group of participants shall be awarded all or some of the monetary contributions of the group. These proponents suggest that the randomness of the drawing and the autonomy of the participants render the lottery fair and sponsorship by the state unobjectionable. Opponents of state-supported gambling argue, by contrast, that states market lotteries by making inappropriate emotional appeals and by supplying information of dubious veracity. Consequently, so this group argues, lotteries must be judged as unfair gaming devices and state support viewed as improper. I shall show that both camps have fundamentally misunderstood the problem. Evaluating whether state lotteries are sales or swindles relies neither on an analysis of subjective attitudes nor on an examination of purely procedural aspects of play. Correct analysis depends on a determination of what lotteries are. That is, there is a difference between claiming what a lottery does and what it claims to be, between how it works and what it is. If a lottery is claimed to be something that it is not, then regardless of what one gets for one’s money, one has been swindled. I will show that performing an ontological examination of the state-supported lottery reveals it to be a swindle. I conclude by suggesting that some of the confusion regarding the legitimacy of the state-sponsored lottery stems from misunderstandings of several tenets of liberalism. It is these misunderstandings that at times are employed to justify lotteries. (shrink)

Сборник статии и интервюта на академик Едуард Павлович Кругляков, редовен член на Руската академия на науките, физик с висок международен научен престиж и председател на Комисията за борба с лъженауката и с фалшифицирането на научните изследвания към Руската академия на науките. Книгата е ориентирана към съвремието, свързано с настъпването на лъженауката в Русия, и много по-слабо засяга проблемите на догматичната и силово налагана лъженаука през сталиновия период.

This series of character sketches is disappointing to the reader expecting an interpretive historical document. The bulk of the book is taken up with reflections about the author's mother, who died when Svetlana was only six, her mother's family, her brothers, and her sweethearts. Many readers are naturally interested in the figure of Stalin, but he is treated directly only in small and scattered portions of the book with much of the information repeated. It becomes evident that the author knew (...) her father primarily through his impact on the people she loved. Consequently, the figure of Stalin emerges as somewhat enigmatic and mysterious, a combination god and devil. It is apparent that she did not really know him very well, see him very often, or think about him very much. The book is not really about Stalin at all. It is an enjoyable combination of behind-the-scenes gossip, and engrossing narrative fragments.—S. O. H. (shrink)