Volume 1 of “The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898” is entitled “Early Essays and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, 1882–1888.” Included here are all Dewey’s earliest writings, from his first published article through his book on Leibniz.
The materials in this volume provide a chronological record of Dewey’s early development—beginning with the article he sent to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1881 while he was a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and closing with his widely-acclaimed work on Leibniz in the Grigg’s Series of German Philosophical Classics, written when he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. During these years between 1882 and 1888, Dewey’s life course was established: he decided to follow a career in philosophy, completed doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, became an Instructor at the University of Michigan, was promoted to Assistant Professor, and accepted a position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. With the publication of Psychology, he became well known among scholars in this country; a series of articles in the British journal Mind brought him prominence in British philosophical circles. His articles were abstracted in the Revue philosophique.
None of the articles collected in this volume was reprinted during the author’s lifetime. For the first time, it is now possible for Dewey scholars to study consecutively in one publication all the essays which originally appeared in many periodicals.
Psychology, John Dewey’s first book, is an appropriate choice for the first volume in the Southern Illinois University series “The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898.” With an original publication date of 1887, Psychology is volume 2 of “The Early Works.” It appears first in the series to introduce scholars and general readers to the use of modern textual criticism in a work outside the literary field. Designed as a scholar’s reading edition, the volume presents the text of Dewey’s work as the author intended, clear of editorial footnotes. All apparatus is conveniently arranged in appendix form. As evidence of its wide adoption and use as a college textbook, Psychology had a publishing history of twenty-six printings. For two of the reprintings, Dewey made extensive revisions in content to incorporate developments in the field of psychology as well as in his own thinking. The textual appendices include a thorough tabulation of these changes.
In recognition of the high quality and scholarly standards of the textual criticism, this edition of Psychology is the first nonliterary work awarded the Seal of the Modern Language Association Center for Editions of American Authors. By applying to the work of a philosopher the procedures used in modern textual editions of American writers such as Hawthorne, the Southern Illinois University Dewey project is establishing a pattern for future collected writing of philosophers.
This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey’s early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris’s death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey’s returning to fill that post after a year’s stay at Minnesota.
Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey’s earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. Dewey’s marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article “The Present Position of Logical Theory,” recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections.
The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, “A Note on Applied Psychology,” documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey’s and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey’s conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing.
Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics.
Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period.
This fifth and concluding volume of “The Early Works of John Dewey” is the only one of the series made up entirely of essays. The appearance during the four-year period, 1895–98, of thirty-eight items amply indicates that Dewey continued to maintain a high level of published output. These were the years of Dewey’s most extensive work and involvement at the University of Chicago.
Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and William P. McKenzie, Professor of Philosophy and Education at Southern Illinois University, has written an introduction identifying the thread connecting the apparently diffuse material in the many articles of this volume—Dewey’s attempt to unite philosophy with psychology and sociology and with education.
Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.
Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience.
Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.
In Earth in Mind, noted environmental educator David W. Orr focuses not on problems in education, but on the problem of education. Much of what has gone wrong with the world, he argues, is the result of inadequate and misdirected education that:
The author begins by establishing the grounds for a debate about education and knowledge. He describes the problems of education from an ecological perspective, and challenges the "terrible simplifiers" who wish to substitute numbers for values. He follows with a presentation of principles for re-creating education in the broadest way possible, discussing topics such as biophilia, the disciplinary structure of knowledge, the architecture of educational buildings, and the idea of ecological intelligence. Orr concludes by presenting concrete proposals for reorganizing the curriculum to draw out our affinity for life.
"As I write this, I am sitting in a cabin at Cedar Point Biological Station in southwestern Nebraska.... The glorious elemental mixture of earth, water, and sky around me is the home of nearly three hundred species of birds, and comprises one of my favorite places in the world. Here no radio stations blare out the most recent results of meaningless sports events ... no traffic noises confound the senses. Instead the wind is the unquestioned dominating summer influence. The prairie grasses bend willingly and gracefully before it, and the leaves of the cottonwood trees convert its breezes into soft music."
Paul Johnsgard is one of America's most prominent ornithologists and a world authority on waterfowl behavior. In these popularly written, often lyrical essays, he describes some of his most fascinating encounters with birds, from watching the annual mating displays of prairie-chickens on a hilltop in Pawnee County, Nebraska, to attempting to solve some of the mysteries surrounding Australia's nearly flightless musk duck.
Reflecting his worldwide interests and travels, the birds Johnsgard describes inhabit many parts of the globe. Grouping the birds by the element they frequent most—earth, water, or sky—he weaves a wealth of accurate natural history into personal stories drawn from a lifetime of avian observation. And, as a bonus, Johnsgard's lovely pen-and-ink drawings illustrate each species he describes.
Throughout the Middle Ages, enormously popular bestiaries presented people with descriptions of rare and unusual animals, typically paired with a moral or religious lesson. The real and the imaginary blended seamlessly in these books—at the time, the existence of a rhinoceros was as credible as a unicorn or dragon. Although audiences now scoff at the impossibility of mythological beasts, there remains an extraordinary willingness to suspend skepticism and believe wild stories about nature, particularly about insects and their relatives in the Phylum Arthropoda.
In The Earwig’s Tail, entomologist May Berenbaum and illustrator Jay Hosler draw on the powerful cultural symbols of these antiquated books to create a beautiful and witty bestiary of the insect world. Berenbaum’s compendium of tales is an alphabetical tour of modern myths that humorously illuminates aerodynamically unsound bees, ear-boring earwigs, and libido-enhancing Spanish flies. She tracks down the germ of scientific truth that inspires each insect urban legend and shares some wild biological lessons, which, because of the amazing nature of the insect world, can be more fantastic than even the mythic misperceptions.
A collection of essays in which a dozen historians and novelists present their impressions and concerns about "end of the century Nevada." Human expectations and illusions are seen as a backdrop for today's Nevada as a new human frontier. As an overview of Nevada society, this study deals with culture as well as economics, with tradition as well as rapid population growth. The essayists inquire whether the friction between acquisition and preservation, quick wealth and refined sensitivity, will build a more humane and enlightened society.
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.
Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading "environmentality" in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: "dark ecology."
Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume’s essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others.
Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists’ collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability.
This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as “coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics,” rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today.
Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Petra Kuppers, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Joan Retallack, Joshua Schuster, Jonathan Skinner.
Tintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James—how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton’s confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially for The Age of Innocence.
Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton’s work. Wharton’s response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton’s sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti’s revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home in The Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton’s use of Tiepolo’s fresco in the church of Scalzi.
Tintner concludes by considering Wharton’s literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton’s personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.
"A major accomplishment in the study of Burke." —Choice
More than 200 years after his death, Edmund Burke remains among the most influential conservative writers in the Anglophone world. Burke’s relevance has only grown as the nature of what it means to be a conservative has become hotly contested.
And yet Burke is often discussed more than he is read. Worse, his rhetoric is often pressed into the service of other ideologies. In Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue, Stephen Browne of Pennsylvania State University subjects Burke’s work to the close textual analysis it has never received.
The result of Browne's study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the link between rhetoric and action that is key to understanding Burke, his career, his work, and his influence on contemporary conservatism.
Readers interested in the development of conversative philosophy, politics, and writing from its earliest roots will value this rare and illuminating work.
Media do not simply portray places that already exist; they actually produce them. In exploring how world populations experience "place" through media technologies, the essays included here examine how media construct the meanings of home, community, work, nation, and citizenship.
Tracing how media reconfigure the boundaries between public and private-and global and local-to create "electronic elsewheres," the essays investigate such spaces and identities as the avatars that women are creating on Web sites, analyze the role of satellite television in transforming Algerian neighborhoods, inquire into the roles of radio and television in Israel and India, and take a skeptical look at the purported novelty of the "new media home."
Contributors: Asu Aksoy, Istanbul Bilgi U; Charlotte Brunsdon, U of Warwick; Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, York U (Toronto); Tamar Liebes-Plesner, Hebrew U; David Morley, Goldsmiths, U of London; Lisa Nakamura, U of Illinois; Arvind Rajagopal, New York U; Kevin Robins, Goldsmiths, U of London; Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern U; Marita Sturken, New York U; and Shunya Yoshimi, U of Tokyo.
For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world.
The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation).
Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.
Janet Burroway followed in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, she was an earlyMademoiselle guest editor in New York, an Ivy League and Cambridge student, an aspiring poet-playwright-novelist in the period before feminism existed, a woman who struggled with her generation's conflicting demands of work and love. Unlike Plath, Janet Burroway survived.
In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life—divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlight the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.
“Ordinary life is more dangerous than war because nobody survives,” Burroway contemplates in the essay “Danger and Domesticity,” yet each of her meditations reminds us that it's our daily rituals and trials that truly keep us alive.
Harnessing a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents, this volume delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.
Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, the contributors write that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism.
Contributors
Mike Anastario
Ally Ang
Antonia Barreau
Julián Caviedes
Chen Chen
Evelyn Flores
Terese V. Gagnon
José Tomás Ibarra
Fred L. Joiner
Gary Nabhan
Virginia D. Nazarea
Shannon A. Novak
Valentina Peveri
Emily Ramsey
Yasuaki Sato
Justin Simpson
David E. Sutton
Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Michael Bourdaghs, Judith Farquhar, Marta Hanson, Thomas LaMarre, Philippa Levine, Hugh Shapiro, Nathan Sivin
Amid the historical decimation of species around the globe, a new way into the language of loss
An endling is the last known individual of a species; when that individual dies, the species becomes extinct. These “last individuals” are poignant characters in the stories that humans tell themselves about today’s Anthropocene. In this evocative work, Lydia Pyne explores how discussion about endlings—how we tell their histories—draws on deep traditions of storytelling across a variety of narrative types that go well beyond the science of these species’ biology or their evolutionary history.
Endlings provides a useful and thoughtful discussion of species concepts: how species start and how (and why) they end, what it means to be a “charismatic” species, the effects of rewilding, and what makes species extinction different in this era. From Benjamin the thylacine to Celia the ibex to Lonesome George the Galápagos tortoise, endlings, Pyne shows, have the power to shape how we think about grief, mourning, and loss amid the world’s sixth mass extinction.
Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa.
Contributors:
Jane Carruthers
Mara Goldman
Amanda Hammar
Jonathan Highfield
David McDermott Hughes
Roderick P. Neumann
Rob Nixon
Anthony Vital
Laura Wright
With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.
The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.
We sit at the doorstep of multiple revolutions in robotic, genetic, information, and communication technologies, whose powerful interactions promise social and environmental transformations we are only beginning to understand. How can we anticipate their impacts and ensure that these new technologies help move us in a more sustainable direction?
Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow is a collection of essays by leading scientists, technologists, and thinkers that examine the nature of current technological changes, their environmental implications, and possible strategies for the transition to a sustainable future. It offers a baseline understanding of new technological developments, as well as important insights for moving beyond business-as-usual by developing more anticipatory approaches to environmental protection and more comprehensive strategies for promoting the transformation of technology.
Among the contributors are Brad Allenby, David Bell, Steward Brand, Michael Braungart, Lester Brown, Joanne Ciulla, Denis Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Amory Lovins, William McDonough, Gary Marchant, David Ronfeldt, John Seely-Brown, Gus Speth, and Timothy Sturgeon.
Contemporary scholarship has given rise to several modes of understanding biophysical and human nature, each entangled with related notions of science and religion. Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion represents the culmination of three years of collaboration by an international group of fourteen natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, and theologians. The result is an intellectually stimulating volume that explores how the ideas of nature pertain to science and religion.
The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay.
From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form.
This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.
From humble beginnings, Bartolomeo Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence as a leading citizen of Florence, serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence, a post he held for fifteen years. His palace in Borgo Pinti, modeled on classical designs, was emblematic of his achievements as a humanist as well as a public official. Along with his professional writings as chancellor, Scala’s personal treatises, fables, and dialogues—widely read and admired by his contemporaries—were deeply indebted to classical sources. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, whose works he had access to through the Medici libraries, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Perhaps the most significant is the Defense against the Detractors of Florence, a key document in the development of modern republicanism.
This volume presents fresh translations by Renée Neu Watkins of five of the texts based on Latin editions by Alison Brown, who also contributes an introduction to Scala’s life and works.
This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of his works. Miscellaneous and diverse though the pieces are, they are unified by James's style and personality, which shine through even the slightest of them.
The volume includes 25 essays, 44 letters to the editor commenting on sundry topics, and 113 reviews of a wide range of works in English, French, German, and Italian. Twenty-three of the items are not recorded in any bibliography of James's writings. Two of the new discoveries are of particular interest: dating from 1865, when he was still a medical student, they are James's earliest known publications and give his first published views on Darwinian biology, which was to affect profoundly his own work in philosophy and psychology. Among his reviews are one of "Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phäomene," by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, published a year after the first appearance of that historically famous essay, and showing the breadth of James's interests, reviews of George Santayana's Sense of Beauty (1897) and Bernard Berenson's Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896).
Essays in Ancient Philosophy was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
To understand ancient philosophy "in its concrete, complex detail," Michael Frede says, "one has also to look at all the other histories to which it is tied by an intricate web of casual connections which run both ways." Frede's distinctive approach to the history of ancient philosophy is closely tied to his specific interests within the field - the Hellenistic philosophers and those of late antiquity, who are the primary subjects of this book. Long ignored or even maligned, the Stoics and Skeptics, medical philosophers, and grammarians are extremely interesting once their actual views are reconstructed and it is possible to recognize their ties to earlier and later philosophical thought. Refusing to study them as paradigms of achievement, or to seek purely philosophical explanations for their views, Frede draws instead upon those "other histories"—of religion, social structure, law and politics—to illuminate their work and to show how it was interpreted and transformed by succeeding generations.
The essays in this volume represent trends in social stratification studies undertaken in major culture areas of the world. The empirical data of the chapters are set with special reference to the dynamics of processes within these diverse traditions and heritages as sources of comparison with one another and with the experiences of western societies.
Examines and explores divers topics of Jewish thought and history
A fascinating and eclectic collection of twenty-two essays, Essays in Jewish Thought examines and explores diverse topics of Jewish thought and history. From Judaism’s view of ancient Rome at its imperial apogee and the Dead Sea Scrolls to Jewish thought in Europe’s revolutions of 1848 and Franz Kafka, the collection offers a rich compendium of essays of interest to scholars, historians, philosophers, and students.
"Raymond and Russell have fashioned a lively, useful volume. . . . The ability and integrity of the contributors make much of the difference, but the editors have given the book direction by soliciting state of the art essays in three fields . . . dialectology (the articles represent area linguistics at its best), grammar and usage (Algeo on usage shibboleths is particularly fine), and lexicography (a delight)."
—Choice
"These essays are quietly unassuming in tone but highly useful."
—Language in Society
The effect of Western influence on the later Ottoman Empire and on the development of the modern Turkish nation-state links these twelve essays by a prominent American scholar. Roderic Davison draws from his extensive knowledge of Western diplomatic history and Turkish history to describe a period in which the actions of the Great Powers, incipient and rising nationalisms, and Westernizing reforms shaped the destiny of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the new Turkish Republic.
Eleven of the essays were previously published in widely scattered journals and multi-authored volumes. The first of these provides a general survey of Turkish and Ottoman history, from early Turkish times to the end of the Empire. The following essays continue chronologically from 1774, detailing some of the changes in the nineteenth-century Empire. Several themes recur. One is the impact of Western ideas and institutions and the resistance to that influence by some elements in the Empire. Another concerns the diplomatic pressure exerted by the Great Powers of Europe on the Empire, which amounted at times to direct intervention in Ottoman domestic affairs. Taken together, the essays portray a confluence of civilizations as well as a clash of cultures.
Professor Davison has written an interpretive introduction that sets out the historical trends running throughout the book. In addition, he includes a previously unpublished article on the advent of the electric telegraph in the Ottoman Empire to show how the adoption of a Western technological advance could affect many areas of life.
Of particular interest to students of Ottoman and Middle East history, these essays will also be valuable for everyone concerned with modernization in developing nations. Davison's interpretations and keen methodological sense also shed new light on several aspects of European diplomatic history.
Essays in Philosophy brings together twenty-one essays, reviews, and occasional pieces published by James between 1876 and 1910. They range in subject from a concern with the teaching of philosophy and appraisals of philosophers to analyses of important problems.
Several of the essays, like "The Sentiment of Rationality" and "The Knowing of Things Together," are of particular significance in the development of the views of James's later works. All of them, as John McDermott says in his Introduction, are in a style that is "engaging and personal...witty, acerbic, compassionate, and polemical." Whether he is writing an article for the Nation of a definition of "Experience" for Baldwin's Dictionary or "The Mad Absolute" for the Journal of Philosophy, James is always unmistakably himself, and always readable.
The more than fifty articles, essays, and reviews in this volume, collected here for the first time, were published by William James over a span of some twenty-five years. The record of a sustained interest in phenomena of a highly controversial nature, they make it amply clear that James's work in psychical research was not an eccentric hobby but a serious and sympathetic concern. James was broad-minded in his approach but tough-minded in his demand that investigations be conducted in rigorous scientific terms. He hoped his study of psychic phenomena would strengthen the philosophy of an open-ended, pluralistic universe that he was formulating during the same period, and he looked forward to the new horizons for human experience that a successful outcome of his research would create.
Robert A. McDermott, in his Introduction, discusses the relation of these essays to James's other work in philosophy, psychology, and religion.
The twenty-nine articles, essays, and reviews in this volume, collected here for the first time, were published by William James over a long span of years, from 1878 (twelve years prior to The Principles of Psychology) to 1906. Some are theoretical; others examine specific psychological phenomena or report the results of experiments James had conducted.
Written for the most part for a scholarly rather than a popular audience, they exhibit James's characteristic lucidity and persuasiveness, and they reveal the roots and development of his view on a wide range of psychological issues. As William R. Woodward notes in his Introduction, these essays "bring the reader closer to James's sources, thereby illuminating his indebtedness to tradition as well as his creative departure from it."
Essays in Religion and Morality brings together a dozen papers of varying length to these two themes so crucial to the life and thought of William James. Reflections on the two subjects permeate, first, James's presentation of his father's Literary Remains; second, his writings on human immortality and the relation between reason and faith; third, his two memorial pieces, one on Robert Gould Shaw and the other on Emerson; fourth, his consideration of the energies and powers of human life; and last, his writings on the possibilities of peace, especially as found in his famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War."
These speeches and essays were written over a period of twenty-four years. The fact that James did not collect and publish them himself in a single volume does not reflect on their intrinsic worth or on their importance in James's philosophical work, since they include some of the best known and most influential of his writings. All the essays, throughout their varied subject matter, are consistently and characteristically Jamesian in the freshness of their attack on the problems and failings of humankind and in their steady faith in human powers.
These three elegant essays develop principles central to the understanding of the diverse ways in which imperfect information affects the distribution of resources, incentives, and the evaluation of economic policy. The first concerns the special role that information plays in the allocation process when it is possible to improve accuracy through private investment. The common practice of hiring “experts” whose information is presumably much better than their clients' is analyzed. Issues of cooperative behavior when potential group members possess diverse pieces of information are addressed. Emphasis is placed on the adaptation of the “core” concept from game theory to the resource allocation model with differential information.
The second essay deals with the extent to which agents can influence the random events they face. This is known as moral hazard, and in its presence there is a potential inefficiency in the economic system. Two special models are studied: the role of moral hazard in a monetary economy, and the role of an outside adjudicatory agency that has the power to enforce fines and compensation.
The final essay discusses the problem of certainty equivalence in economic policy. Conditions under which a full stochastic optimization can be calculated by solving a related, much simpler “certainty equivalence” problem are developed. The reduction in the complexity of calculation involved is very great compared with the potential loss of efficiency.
Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of “Elia” allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination. The resulting essays touch upon a wide range of compelling subjects from the deliciously humorous “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” to the poignantly reflective “New Year's Eve.” Yet collectively they also comprise a fascinating personal memoir, veiled under the pseudonymous disguise of Elia. Now back in print with a new foreword by the distinguished personal essayist Phillip Lopate and with useful annotations, Essays of Elia will provide a delicious stylistic treat for all readers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, “was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own.” His celebrated essays—the twelve published in Essays: First Series (1841) and eight in Essays: Second Series (1844)—are here presented for the first time in an authoritative one-volume edition, which incorporates all the changes and corrections Emerson made after their initial publication.
The text is reproduced from the second and third volumes of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical edition which draws on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last half century. Alfred R. Ferguson was founding editor of the edition, followed by Joseph Slater (until 1996).
G. E. M. Anscombe's Intention, firmly established the philosophy of action as a distinctive field of inquiry. Donald Davidson called this 94-page book "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle." But until quite recently, few scholars recognized the magnitude of Anscombe's philosophical achievement. This collection of ten essays elucidates some of the more challenging aspects of Anscombe's work and affirms her reputation as one of our most original philosophers.
Born in 1919, Anscombe studied at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where she later held a research fellowship. In 1941 she married philosopher Peter Geach, with whom she had seven children. A close friend of Wittgenstein, in 1946 she joined Oxford's Somerville College and spent the next twenty-four years there before being appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge that Wittgenstein had held. She died in 2001 after her long career as a highly regarded analytic philosopher.
This volume brings together fresh interpretations of Intention written by some of today's leading philosophers of action. It will enlighten Anscombe's readers who struggle with concepts they find puzzling or obscure, while providing a bracing corrective to doubts about Intention's significance and the gravity of what is at stake.
Eighteen essays by leading scholars in English, speech communication, education, and philosophy explore the vitality of the classical rhetorical tradition and its influence on both contemporary discourse studies and the teaching of writing.
Some of the essays investigate theoretical and historical issues. Others show the bearing of classical rhetoric on contemporary problems in composition, thus blending theory and practice. Common to the varied approaches and viewpoints expressed in this volume is one central theme: the 20th-century revival of rhetoric entails a recovery of the classical tradition, with its marriage of a rich and fully articulated theory with an equally efficacious practice. A preface demonstrates the contribution of Edward P. J.Corbett to the 20th-century revival, and a last chapter includes a bibliography of his works.
The essays in this book, written over a span of some twenty years but updated for this publication, discuss episodes of mass murder that are often considered instances of genocide: the large-scale killing of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during World War I, the near-extinction of North America’s Indian population, the vicious persecution of the “Roma” or Gypsies under the Nazi regime. But in line with Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948, Lewy stresses the crucial importance of looking closely at the intent of the perpetrators. In contrast to the Holocaust, the killers in the atrocities mentioned above did not seek to destroy an entire people, and so, these three large-scale killings do not deserve the label of genocide.
Lewy argues that affirming the distinctiveness of the Holocaust does not deny, downgrade, or trivialize the suffering of other people. The crimes against the Ottoman Armenians, the American Indians, and the Gypsies—even if they did not reach the threshold of genocide—involved horrendous suffering and a massive loss of life. The genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda that took place in the second half of the twentieth century remind us that man’s inhumanity to man can take many forms and is not the special prerogative of any particular group. The last essay of the collection deals with the complications of humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide. As the recent support of the Libyan rebels by NATO demonstrates, the issues raised here remain topical and controversial.
Osip Mandel'stam is coming to be recognized as one of the major poets of our century. He is also one of the most enigmatic. Kiril Taranovsky's erudite knowledge of Russian poetry and his mastery of textual analysis are here combined to produce the most successful interpretation of Mandel'stam's verse yet published.
Individual poems are read on three levels: the text itself; the historical and poetic context of the poem; and its “subtext,” the motifs, images, and patterns Mandel'stam appropriates for his own purposes from the work of other writers. Verses analyzed are quoted in the original. The author demonstrates how the meaning and imagery of the poems relate to a context of personal experience and poetic tradition. In this discussion he draws on his extensive comprehension of European traditions; yet his revelation of literary connections never obscures the linguistic expressiveness and imagistic vividness of Mandel'stam's work. By correlating the text and a suggested subtext he isolates a specific procedure in Mandel'stam and also a fundamental principle in modern poetry. Thus his contribution is to the broader theory of poetics as well as to specific study of this one great poet.
Throughout his career Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963) made unique and lasting contributions to classical scholarship and the history of religion, especially to the study of ancient religion, magic, and the relation of paganism to early Christianity and Judaism. Nock's genius showed itself early: endowed with a prodigious memory and an unerring linguistic skill, he combined speed and accuracy in reading and a delight in the discovery, ordering and establishment of facts. At the age of twenty he was made annual reviewer of Latin literature for The Year's Work in Classical Studies; and at twenty-four he produced an important edition of a fourth-century Greek text, Sallustius On the Gods and the Universe, which included a translation and a masterly introduction.
At twenty-seven, having come to the United States from England the year before, Nock was appointed Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard University. In his early thirties he wrote two books, Conversion--an imaginative and exacting study of religious currents in the Hellenistic and Roman world--and St. Paul.
Mainly, however, A. D. Nock poured his immense learning into articles and reviews, which heretofore have been scattered through many different journals. Representing a formidable range of learning, these essays deal for the most part with historical evidence (from all sources, including papyri, inscriptions, and coins) of the beliefs, superstitions, and religious practices of ordinary people. Nock saw the essence of religion not only in philosophy ortheology, but in piety and cult, in the practices and the expressions of the common man. His unusual combination of genius and common sense allowed him to treat the actual manifestations of religious sentiment without condescension.
For this edition of Arthur Darby Nock's writings, Zeph Stewart has garnered a substantial selection of Nock's most important essays and has indexed and cross-referenced them as well.
Throughout his career Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963) made unique and lasting contributions to classical scholarship and the history of religion, especially to the study of ancient religion, magic, and the relation of paganism to early Christianity and Judaism. Nock's genius showed itself early: endowed with a prodigious memory and an unerring linguistic skill, he combined speed and accuracy in reading and a delight in the discovery, ordering and establishment of facts. At the age of twenty he was made annual reviewer of Latin literature for The Year's Work in Classical Studies; and at twenty-four he produced an important edition of a fourth-century Greek text, Sallustius On the Gods and the Universe, which included a translation and a masterly introduction.
At twenty-seven, having come to the United States from England the year before, Nock was appointed Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard University. In his early thirties he wrote two books, Conversion--an imaginative and exacting study of religious currents in the Hellenistic and Roman world--and St. Paul.
Mainly, however, A. D. Nock poured his immense learning into articles and reviews, which heretofore have been scattered through many different journals. Representing a formidable range of learning, these essays deal for the most part with historical evidence (from all sources, including papyri, inscriptions, and coins) of the beliefs, superstitions, and religious practices of ordinary people. Nock saw the essence of religion not only in philosophy ortheology, but in piety and cult, in the practices and the expressions of the common man. His unusual combination of genius and common sense allowed him to treat the actual manifestations of religious sentiment without condescension.
For this edition of Arthur Darby Nock's writings, Zeph Stewart has garnered a substantial selection of Nock's most important essays and has indexed and cross-referenced them as well.
Essays on Scandinavian History examines important aspects of the history of Sweden and its Nordic neighbors between the later eighteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Historian H. Arnold Barton has selected thirteen of the numerous essays he has published over the past forty years on the history of Scandinavia.
This is a companion volume to Barton's The Old Country and the New, an essay collection on Swedish emigration and the Swedes in America. Included here are studies of the special significance of the eighteenth century in Sweden's history and culture, the relationship of King Gustaf III to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the impact of the American Revolution in Sweden, and Gustaf III's ambitions in the East Baltic region. Also detailed are the king's early reaction to the French Revolution and his efforts to organize a European coalition to crush it, a reassessment of the reign and internal reforms of Gustaf IV Adolf, and the Swedish succession crises of 1809 and 1810.
In addition, Barton examines the increasing tension between the Pan-Scandinavian movement and the rising Finnish national movement. He deals with the historians of the Danish Agrarian Reforms of 1784-1814, parallel developments in Finland and Norway between 1808 and 1917, the discovery of Norway abroad, Swedish national romanticism, and Sweden's transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, now exemplifying the rational and humane ideals of the twentieth century.
Essays on Scandinavian History highlights important topics in the history of the Scandinavian region, which has remained all too little known outside the Nordic lands themselves, while also offering broader perspectives on Europe since the mid-eighteenth century. Twelve keyed-to-text illustrations, a bibliography of Barton's publications on Scandinavian history, essay endnotes, and an index augment this work.
Emory Kemp is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he also served as a chair and professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. This collection of essays encompasses over fifty years of his research in the field of the history of technology.
Within these twelve essays, Kemp describes and analyzes nineteenth century improvements in building materials such as iron, steel, and cement; roads and bridges, especially the evolution of the suspension bridge; canals and navigable rivers, including the Ohio River and its tributaries; and water supply systems. As one of the few practicing American engineers who also researches and writes as an academic, Kemp adds an important historical context to his work by focusing not only on the construction of a structure but also on the analytical science that heralds a structure’s design and development.
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