Search results for ""Pennsylvania State University Press""

In their efforts to uncover the principles of a robust conception of democracy, theorists of deliberative democracy place a premium on the role of political expression—public speech and reasoned debate—as the key to democratic processes. They also frequently hark back to historical antecedents (as in the Habermasian invocation of the “public sphere” of eighteenth-century bourgeois society and the Arendtian valorization of the classical Athenian polis) in their quest to establish that deliberative procedures are more than “merely theoretical” and instead have a practical application. But for all this emphasis on the discursive and historical dimensions of democracy, these theorists have generally neglected the rich resources available in the history of rhetorical theory and practice. It is the purpose of Talking Democracy to resurrect this history and show how attention to rhetoric can help lead to a better understanding of both the strengths and limitations of current theories of deliberative democracy. Contributors, besides the editors, are Russell Bentley, Tsae Lan Lee Dow, Tom Murphy, Arlene Saxonhouse, Gary Shiffman, John Uhr, Nadia Urbinati, John von Heyking, and Douglas Walton.

Read more less

Were the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks courageous "freedom fighters" or despicable terrorist murderers? These opposing characterizations reveal in extreme form the incompatibility between different moral visions that underlie many conflicts in the world today, conflicts that challenge us to consider how moral disputes may be resolved. Eschewing the resort to universal moral principles favored by traditional Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Joseph Margolis sets out to sketch an alternative approach that accepts the lack of any neutral ground or privileged normative perspective for deciding moral disputes.This "second-best" morality nevertheless aspires to achieve an "objectively" valid resolution through a dialectical procedure of reasoning toward a modus vivendi, an accommodation of prudential interests that are rooted in the customs and practices of the societies in conflict. In working out this approach, Margolis engages with a wide range of thinkers, from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Rawls, Habermas, MacIntyre, Rorty, and Nussbaum, and his argument is enlivened by reference to many specific moral issues, such as abortion, the control of Kashmir, and the continuing struggle between the Muslim world and the West.

Read more less

The family register holds a distinctive place in American visual culture. Used to record marriages and offspring within a family through several generations, the family register also incorporates hand-illuminated decorative art. To the Latest Posterity is the first major study to explore the colorful world of Pennsylvania German family registers and their place in American social, religious, and cultural traditions.Renowned authorities on fraktur, Russell and Corinne Earnest trace the evolution of decorative family registers from their roots in medieval European illuminated manuscripts to their distinctly American forms that spread through Pennsylvania German culture. The form had a special association with persecuted Mennonites, who used the decorative documents to claim roots in their new home. The documents came to represent the separation from the Old World and the creation of family roots in the New. To the Latest Posterity is filled with examples of family registers from museums and private collections, including early handmade work as well as printed registers that were hand-filled in the nineteenth century. Bringing the art to the twentieth century, the Earnests discuss the adoption of the art by Amish, who continue the practice of illuminated family record-keeping today. Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series

Read more less

Siena of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was one of the great cities of Europe and its artists—Duccio, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti—were among those who reshaped the nature and place of painting first in Italy, then across Europe. Drawing on the extraordinary riches of Sienese archives, on early unpublished secondary sources, and on the recent work of historians, Hayden Maginnis situates early Sienese painters within their society and their city and provides the first comprehensive account of the economic, social, religious, and intellectual world of Siena’s artists. Where did painters live? How much were they paid? What was their social status? Were painters aware of the novel importance of thirteenth-century optics? Were the famous Sienese painters isolated figures, surrounded by a few secondary figures, or were they part of a larger community? These and a host of related questions structure Maginnis’s book, which demonstrates how firmly painters’ lives were embedded in the values and customs of their society and how important the particular character of their society was for the patronage artists received. The World of the Early Sienese Painter is the second volume of a trilogy Maginnis began with Painting in the Age of Giotto (1997). The third volume will turn from the broad social and cultural history of the present book to a history of early Sienese painting.

Read more less

Deeply embedded in the history of Latin Europe, the vernacular ("the language of slaves") still draws us towards urgent issues of affiliation, identity, and cultural struggle. Vernacular politics in medieval Latin Europe were richly complex and the structures of thought and feeling they left behind permanently affected Western culture. The Vulgar Tongue explores the history of European vernacularity through more than a dozen studies of language situations from twelfth-century England and France to twentieth-century India and North America, and from the building of nations, empires, or ethnic communities to the politics of gender, class, or religion. The essays in The Vulgar Tongue offer new vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llull’s thirteenth-century prefiguration of universal grammar, the orthography of Early Middle English, the humanist struggle for linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here Latin, the "common tongue" of European intellectuals, is sometimes just another vernacular, Sanskrit and Hindi stake their claims as the languages of Shakespeare, African-American poetry is discovered in conversation with Middle English, and fourteenth-century Florence becomes the city, not of Dante and Boccaccio, but of the artisan poet Pucci. Delicate political messages are carried by nuances of French dialect, while the status of French and German as feminine "mother tongues" is fiercely refuted and as fiercely embraced. Clerics treat dialect, idiom, and gesture—not language itself—as the hallmarks of "vulgar" preaching, or else argue the case for Bible translation mainly in pursuit of their own academic freedom. Endlessly fluid in meaning and reference, the term "vernacular" emerges from this book as a builder of bridges between the myriad phenomena it can describe, as a focus of reflection both on the history of Western culture and on the responsibilities of those who would analyze it.

Read more less

You know the Carnegie Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but have you ever visited the Toy Robot Museum in Adamstown or Bill's Old Bike Barn in Bloomsburg? The Tom Mix Museum in Mix Run? The Houdini Museum in Scranton? Pennsylvania's many small museums are easy to miss in an age of instant information and superhighways. After reading Therese Boyd's guide, however, you'll rush to get off the beaten track to find them. Pennsylvania's little wonders are as entertaining as they are educational. Unlike large museums, which display masterpieces of art and other "important" items, small museums feature objects that would otherwise be thrown away and forgotten—everything from spittoons to high button shoes and trolley cars. Some small museums, such as the Richard Allen Museum, serve a serious purpose; others are playful, even eccentric. All offer a fresh perspective on how people have lived and worked. Boyd, who has visited small museums throughout Pennsylvania, concentrates on the forty-two museums she considers most worth a detour. These range from Kready's Museum, where visitors can savor the simple pleasures of a country store, to the Vocal Groups Hall of Fame and Museum, where music fans can listen to "golden oldies" and pore over memorabilia (including sequined dresses once worn by the Supremes). Boyd's personal favorite is the museum in the home of Christian Sanderson, a man who collected literally hundreds of historical relics, not the least of which is the purse found in the apron pocket of Jennie Wade, the only civilian killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. Boyd's book is a comprehensive, illustrated guide to the best small museums in Pennsylvania. It weaves amusing anecdotes about Boyd's own visits to the museums along with descriptions of their histories and collections. Her guide provides travel directions as well as complete information about each museum's visiting hours, website, and contact information.

Read more less

Cold War Endgame is the product of an unusual collaborative effort by policy makers and scholars to promote better understanding of how the Cold War ended. It includes the transcript of a conference, hosted by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, in which high-level veterans of the Bush and Gorbachev governments shared their recollections and interpretations of the crucial events of 1989–91: the revolutions in Eastern Europe; the reunification of Germany; the Persian Gulf War; the August 1991 coup; and the collapse of the USSR. Taking this testimony as a common reference and drawing on the most recent evidence available, six chapters follow in which historians and political scientists explore the historical and theoretical puzzles presented by this extraordinary transition. This discussion features a debate over the relative importance of ideas, personality, and economic pressures in explaining the Cold War's end.

Read more less

The fifteenth century is more than any other the century of the persecution of witches. So wrote Johan Huizinga more than eighty years ago in his classic Autumn of the Middle Ages. Although Huizinga was correct in his observation, modern readers have tended to focus on the more spectacular witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, it was during the late Middle Ages that the full stereotype of demonic witchcraft developed in Europe, and this is the subject of Battling Demons.At the heart of the story is Johannes Nider (d. 1438), a Dominican theologian and reformer who alternately persecuted heretics and negotiated with them—a man who was by far the most important church authority to write on witchcraft in the early fifteenth century. Nider was a major source for the infamous Malleus maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches (1486), the manual of choice for witch-hunters in late medieval Europe. Today Nider's reputation rests squarely on his witchcraft writings, but in his own day he was better known as a leader of the reform movement within the Dominican order and as a writer of important tracts on numerous other aspects of late medieval religiosity, including heresy and lay piety. Battling Demons places Nider in this wider context, showing that for late medieval thinkers, witchcraft was one facet of a much larger crisis plaguing Christian society. As the only English-language study to focus exclusively on the rise of witchcraft in the early fifteenth century, Battling Demons will be important to students and scholars of the history of magic and witchcraft and medieval religious history.

Read more less

Centre County offers a marvelous vantage point from which to view Pennsylvania’s indigenous cuisine. Centrally located, it has become an island of regional specialties that make use of natural abundance in time-honored ways.The draw of Penn State University brings the sons and daughters of a vast number of the Commonwealth’s citizenry into the area, along with their food preferences. International students create a microcosm of diversity that is unmatched by any other similar-size geographic region in the state. A sophistication spurred by foreign travel, along with the entertaining demands of the University and local corporations, makes the cuisine of Central Pennsylvania well worth serious study and appreciation.In Seasons of Central Pennsylvania, Anne Quinn Corr demonstrates how the people of the Keystone State take a singular and active delight in their environment and its natural gifts. Each section focuses on a season, beginning with fall, as leaves turn color and tailgating begins. More than thirty original and adapted recipes are featured in each section, as well as photos and vignettes on area cooks, and stories about local events and activities that celebrate each season. The recipes include a wide variety of Central Pennsylvania ingredients, but also demonstrate the region’s cultural diversity with appetizing international recipes.Many of the recipes and photographs included in Seasons of Central Pennsylvania were first published in food features by the author in the Centre Daily Times, the newspaper of Central Pennsylvania.

Read more less

This survey of more than fifty years of national security policy juxtaposes declassified U. S. national intelligence estimates with recently released Soviet documents disclosing the views of Soviet leaders and their Communist allies on the same events. Matthias shows that U. S. intelligence estimates were usually correct but that our political and military leaders generally ignored them—with sometimes disastrous results. The book begins with a look back at the role of U. S. intelligence during World War II, from Pearl Harbor through the plot against Hitler and the D-day invasion to the "unconditional surrender" of Japan, and reveals how better use of the intelligence available could have saved many lives and shortened the war. The following chapters dealing with the Cold War disclose what information and advice U. S. intelligence analysts passed on to policy makers, and also what sometimes bitter policy debates occurred within the Communist camp, concerning Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the turmoil in Eastern Europe, the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars in the Middle East, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In many ways, this is a story of missed opportunities the U. S. government had to conduct a more responsible foreign policy that could have avoided large losses of life and massive expenditures on arms buildups.While not exonerating the CIA for its own mistakes, Matthias casts new light on the contributions that objective intelligence analysis did make during the Cold War and speculates on what might have happened if that analysis and advice had been heeded.

Read more less

This book offers a fresh look at Edmund Husserl’s philosophy as a nonfoundational approach to understanding the self as an embodied presence.Contrary to the conventional view of Husserl as carrying on the Cartesian tradition of seeking a trustworthy foundation for knowledge in the "pure" observations of a disembodied ego, James Mensch introduces us to the Husserl who, anticipating the later investigations of Merleau-Ponty, explored how the body functions to determine our self-presence, our freedom, and our sense of time. The result is a concept of selfhood that allows us to see how consciousness’s arising from sensuous experiences follows from the temporal features of embodiment.From this understanding of what is crucial to Husserl’s phenomenology, the book draws the implications for language and ethics, comparing Husserl’s ideas with those of Derrida on language and with those of Heidegger and Levinas on responsibility. Paradoxically, it is these postmodernists who are shown to be extending the logic of foundationalism to its ultimate extreme, whereas Husserl can be seen as leading the way beyond modernity to a nonfoundational account of the self and its world.

Read more less

The subject of the passions has always haunted Western philosophy and, more often than not, aroused harsh judgments. For the passions represent a force of excess and lawlessness in humanity that produces troubling, confusing paradoxes.Michel Meyer provides new insight into an age-old dilemma: Does passion torture people because it blinds them, or, on the contrary, does it permit them to apprehend who and what we really are?

Read more less

Toleration has become a keystone of liberal political philosophy, but with liberalism under attack today as inadequate for dealing with all the problems of a pluralistic world, other resources are needed. Cary Nederman directs our attention to the creative thinking about toleration that preceded the rise of liberalism and canvasses the diverse ideas proposed then within Christianity as a response to religious, cultural, national, and ethnic differences.

Read more less

Popkin analyzes the role of international actors, notably the United States and the United Nations, and the contributions and limitations of international assistance in efforts to establish accountability and reform the justice system in El Salvador. The author discusses the essential role of civil society in attempts to establish accountability and an effective justice system for all, and looks at the reasons for and the consequences of the limited role played by Salvadorean civil society. She also addresses the challenges facing democratic reform efforts in the context of a postwar crime wave.Peace Without Justice grew out of Margaret Popkin’s extensive experience working as a human rights advocate in El Salvador during the armed conflict and interviews with a variety of Salvadorans and others involved in justice reform and in negotiating and implementing the peace accords.

Read more less

In 1829 David Walker, a free black born in Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote one of America’s most provocative political documents of the nineteenth century, Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Decrying the savage and unchristian treatment blacks suffered in the United States, Walker challenged his “afflicted and slumbering brethren” to rise up and cast off their chains. Walker worked tirelessly to circulate his book via underground networks in the South, and he was so successful that Southern lawmakers responded with new laws cracking down on “incendiary” antislavery material. Although Walker died in 1830, the Appeal remained a rallying point for African Americans for many years to come, anticipating the radicalism of later black leaders, from Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, Jr. In this new edition of the Appeal, the first in over thirty years, Peter P. Hinks, the leading authority on David Walker, provides a masterly introduction and extensive annotations that incorporate the most up-to-date research on Walker, much of it first reported by Hinks in his highly acclaimed biography, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren. Hinks also includes a unique appendix of documents showing the contemporary response—from North and South, black and white—to the Appeal itself and Walker’s attempts to distribute it in the South. Historians and political activists have long recognized the importance of Walker’s Appeal. At last we have an edition worthy of its persuasive immediacy and its enduring place in American history.

Read more less

In Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo, Lynette Bosch examines liturgical manuscripts that members of the powerful Mendoza family commissioned for the cathedral of Toledo at a time when it was the symbolic center of the Spanish nation. Using patronage as a filter, Bosch relates the style, content, and function of these lavish manuscripts to the many-sided ritual life of the Cathedral and, beyond that, to its social and political role in efforts to forge Spanish identity in the midst of the Reconquista.Bosch’s study shows that the patrons of the Toledan manuscripts were active proponents both of the Catholic monarchy and of an extraordinary hybrid culture. Although medieval legend and history are laced through this "caballero culture," Bosch breaks new ground by also connecting it to the taste and outlook associated with the Renaissance. Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo includes a complete catalogue of the Toledan liturgical manuscripts.

Read more less

Little known today, Jean Baffier (1851–1920) was never far from the headlines during his own lifetime. Born into a poor peasant family, he became a self-taught sculptor whose work ranged from decorative objects to portrayals of peasant life and public monuments. But Baffier would probably not have received wide public attention if he had not also become a folklorist, a promoter of regional culture, and a militant nationalist with beliefs so violent that he attempted a political assassination. Monumental Intolerance explores the full gamut of Baffier’s activities and shows that he was pursuing a vast scheme of national purification and rebirth. Neil McWilliam’s discussion of the historical issues surrounding Baffier opens an extraordinary perspective on the culture wars and political struggles of a turbulent period in French history.This book will interest the art-historical community and historians of fin-de-siècle France.

Read more less

Scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America working with the support of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs combine their efforts to bring us new insights into how Russia has conducted its foreign affairs since the fall of Communism. Drawing on both archival sources and interviews, they cover such major issues as Russia's decision to use military force in Chechnya, its reactions to NATO expansion, and its emergent relations with Japan and East Asia. The contributors are Eunsook Chung, Henrikki Heikka, Ted Hopf, Andrea Lopez, Hiroshi Kimura, Sergei Medvedev, and Christer Pursiainen.

Read more less

How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture.Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or "fictions of the feminine": she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions. These imaginary visions of femininity, Charnon-Deutsch argues, were a response to, and also helped to create, gendered stereotypes by suggesting ideal feminine behavior and poses. Further, they comprised a reassuring "between-male" cultural medium that provided graphic validation of women's docile body for a culture enthralled with femininity.Integrating the fields of literature and cultural studies, Charnon-Deutsch's approach to this subject is unique. Many of the images collected here are available for the first time, and they represent only a fraction of the two thousand images Charnon-Deutsch collected during her research. This book will appeal to students of Spanish cultural studies and gender studies, as well as to art historians.

Read more less

Victor Israelyan was a senior ambassador in the Soviet Foreign Ministry when the armies of Egypt and Syria invaded Israeli-occupied territory on October 6, 1973. Critical to the outcome of this conflict were the Soviet Union and the United States, whose diplomatic maneuverings behind the scenes eventually ended what came to be known as the Yom Kippur War. During the crisis, however, tensions between the superpowers nearly escalated into nuclear war. Israelyan is the first Soviet official to give us a firsthand account of what actually happened inside the Kremlin during these three important weeks in 1973. Israelyan's account is a fascinating mixture of memoir, anecdotes, and historical reporting. As a member of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's staff, he was assigned to a four-man task force that attended the many Politburo meetings held during the war. The job of this task force was to take notes and prepare drafts of letters and other documents for the Politburo. In remarkable detail, made possible by his sharp memory and the notes and documents he saved, Israelyan chronicles the day-by-day activities of Kremlin leaders as they confronted the crisis. For the first time we can see how the cumbersome Soviet policy-making mechanism, headed by the Politburo, functioned in a tense international situation. We see how the actions of Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Hafiz al-Assad, and other participants in the crisis were interpreted in Moscow. From his own experience Israelyan gives us intimate portraits of top Soviet officials including Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Andropov. His access to important documents—including letters from Richard Nixon to Leonid Brezhnev, never officially released in the U.S.—provide a much-needed corrective to assertions made by Kissinger, Nixon, and Sadat about the war. Supplemented by rare photographs and interviews with other Soviet officials, Inside the Kremlin During the Yom Kippur War is more than a record of the past. Israelyan offers a unique vantage point on the continuing Middle East conflict, and his candid assessment of the mindset of Russian leaders is instructive for understanding how the present leadership of Russia faces its new role in the post-Cold War world.

Read more less

Unlike many of the major figures in Western philosophy, Kierkegaard explores many issues of interest to feminist theorists today. Moreover, he does so in a style—labyrinthine, many-voiced, multilayered, adverse to authority—that adumbrates écriture féminine.A major question probed in the volume is whether Kierkegaard's writings are misogynist, ambivalent, or essentialist in their views of women and the feminine or whether, in some important and vital ways, they are liberatory and empowering for feminists and women trying to free themselves from the maze of patriarchal constructs.The essays also show how the three existence-spheres—aesthetic, ethical, and religious—articulated in Kierkegaard's authorship inscribe different modalities of the sexual relation: seduction for the aesthetic, marriage for the ethical, and absence from commerce with the other sex for the religious.Contributors are Sylviane Agacinski, Wanda Warren Berry, Birgit Bertung, Jane Duran, Leslie A. Howe, Céline Léon, Tamsin Lorraine, Robert L. Perkins, Mark L. Taylor, Sylvia Walsh, and Julia Watkin.

Read more less

This volume brings together essays by leading philosophers of art who consider what can be learned from the meaning of art about society, morality, and life in general. This subject inevitably leads to discussion of other issues. Is art distinct from life? Is a concern with art's messages consistent with an appropriately aesthetic appreciation of its works? Is there anything distinctive about the manner in which art communicates its messages, or about the messages it conveys? The topic of art's social and moral importance has always been a central one in aesthetics. However, whereas Plato and Schiller, for instance, viewed art as intimately implicated in a person's moral and social education, modernist theories have argued for art's autonomy and separation from worldly matters. The essays presented here provide a contemporary perspective on this long-standing debate and reveal the recent revitalization of humanist concerns in describing art and its significance.Contributors are Stephen Davies, Susan L. Feagin, T. J. Diffey, Jenefer Robinson, Gregory Currie, Peter Lamarque, Jerrold Levinson, David Novitz, Ismay Barwell, Göran Hermerén, and Richard Shusterman.

Read more less

In 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that the State of Wisconsin was not liable for the brutal beating of a young boy by his father, who had been investigated by the Department of Social Services. In DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, Chief Justice William Rehnquist's majority opinion rejected the claim of the boy's mother that her son had been deprived of his constitutional "right to life." Taking the DeShaney case as her point of departure, Elizabeth Bussiere observes that the idea of a constitutional right to life was first rejected not by the conservative Rehnquist Court but by the liberal Warren Court twenty years earlier. She investigates why the Warren Court, despite its many rulings "entitling" the poor to constitutional protections, refused to identify welfare benefits (or subsistence) as a constitutional right.Although focused on the Warren Court, the book explores Western political thought from the seventeenth through late twentieth centuries, draws on American social history from the Age of Jackson through the civil rights era of the 1960s, and utilizes current analytic methods, particularly the "new institutionalism." Finding cultural arguments regarding the absence of constitutional welfare rights inadequate, she illuminates two long-standing traditions—natural law and maternalism—that tended to support the poor's subsistence needs. The key to the failure of constitutional welfare rights, Bussiere argues, lay in an ironic turn in the development of legal doctrines. It was the fidelity of the liberal Warren Court to judicial doctrines that had been formulated in the late 1930s to prevent a conservative Court from defeating social-welfare programs that ultimately led the Warren Court to decline to "constitutionalize" a right to welfare. Her book is particularly timely given President Clinton's approval of a Republican-crafted law in 1996 ending public assistance as a statutory "entitlement''—a decision that might have been thwarted had the Warren Court ruled differently.

Read more less

Villanova University is one of the nation's oldest and largest Catholic universities. Founded in 1842 by the Augustinian order, which continues to support the institution today, Villanova has seen great change and great continuity over its 150-year history. In Villanova University, 1842–1992, historian David Contosta presents a rich combination of text and photographs to recount the history of the school and the forces that shaped its growth.Unlike a traditional commissioned history, Contosta's account shows Villanova in the wider context of American society. He closely examines the American culture, Catholic attitudes and beliefs, and Augustinian order that he finds were most influential in forming Villanova as we know it today.

Read more less

For almost twenty years, feminist readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex have been dominated by dismissive interpretation of Beauvoir’s philosophy as Sartrean and phallocentric. Beauvoir’s angry refusal to acknowledge either her philosophical originality or her lesbian relationships led to an interpretive impasse on two issues: her relationship to existentialism and her relationship to feminism. It was not until Beauvoir’s death in 1986 that this interpretive impasse would be broken. Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir’s death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life’s work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir’s personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir’s philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir’s philosophy written since her death.From phenomenology and literary criticism to analytic philosophy and postmodern deconstruction, this collection presents a unique variety of methodological approaches to reading Beauvoir: placing her within the phenomenological tradition and identifying the Husserlean influence on her work; using the posthumously published letters and notebooks to shed light on Beauvoir’s own experience of oppression and to deconstruct the philosophical movement that exploited her; analyzing the themes and structure of Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins to study her philosophy of the erotic; examining the structure of her argument about women’s biology and sexual difference to challenge the criticism of Beauvoir’s phallocentricism; locating her writings on decolonization as a historical antecedent of the postmodern philosophy of destruction. Of particular interest may be the scholarly reading of little-known texts, such as Beauvoir’s essay on the Marquis de Sade, or her essay “Literature and Metaphysics,” in the context of her better-known texts, such as Ethics of Ambiguity, to trace Beauvoir’s philosophical development and challenge the view that Beauvoir was either Sartrean or phallocentric.

Read more less

Since 1970, when Charles Hamblin issued a challenge for philosophers, logicians, and educators in general to begin work anew in fallacies, a serious literature on fallacies has indeed developed. Part of this literature deals with the theory of what fallacies are; another part of it contains rigorous analyses of particular fallacies. However, most is still not readily accessible to the researcher, teacher, or student of the field. As a result, the best work on fallacies is not finding its way into the classroom, nor is it informing the educational and intellectual experiences available to most college and university students. A major purpose of this book is to make the post-Hamblin work on fallacies available to a wider audience in a single, convenient volume. The editors have brought together for the first time the most important historical writings on fallacy theory, from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill, and the most recent and most important theoretical and pedagogical developments in the field since Hamblin's landmark 1970 book. All but a few of the essays included are new contributions for this anthology, and an extensive annotated bibliography is included for researchers and students of fallacies and fallacy theory.

Read more less

The works covered in college art history classes frequently depict violence against women. Traditional survey textbooks highlight the impressive formal qualities of artworks depicting rape, murder, and other violence but often fail to address the violent content and context. Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer investigates the role that the art history field has played in the past and can play in the future in education around gender violence in the arts. It asks art historians, museum educators, curators, and students to consider how, in the time of #MeToo, a public reckoning with gender violence in art can revitalize the field of art history. Contributors to this timely volume amplify the voices and experiences of victims and survivors depicted throughout history, critically engage with sexually violent images, open meaningful and empowering discussions about visual assaults against women, reevaluate how we have viewed and narrated such works, and assess how we approach and teach

Read more less

Fernando Balius was a perfectly ordinary, if misunderstood, young adultuntil he started hearing voices. In Traces of Madness, Fernando describes what it feels like, both mentally and physically, to lose your grip on reality. His life spins out of control when the voices he hears inside his head, depicted in the narrative as a monster, work to destroy his self-esteem and, worse, urge him to hurt himself. Various psychiatric diagnoses and prescribed medications do more harm than good, prompting Fernando to question whether stifling his voices is truly the right path for him. Throughout his experiences, he finds that his connections with others lend him the strength to survive. Mario Pellejer's moving illustrations bring Nando's remarkable story to life. This raw and uniquely hopeful graphic memoir shows the power of community and understanding and encourages us all to push back in solidarity against the pervasive stigma surrounding mental illness.

Read more less

The Western media largely glossed over the immense human suffering that occurred in Iraq during the embargo of the 1990s and the Iraq War. With this innovative and award-winning graphic novel, French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani sets that record straight. The Flavors of Iraq unfolds as a series of one thousand tweets. In them, Alani describes his experiences in Iraq from 1989, when he traveled from France to meet his extended family in Iraq for the first time, to 2011, when the last Americans pulled out of the country. Alani recounts the vivid impressions this place made on him as a childits wondrous colors, tastes, and smells. And he documents the sounds, silences, and smells of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians lost their lives. Illustrated by the striking art of Léonard Cohen and with a foreword by Ross Caputi, a former US Marine who served in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, The Flavors of Iraq tells a poetic and powerful story of an oppressed population, an illegal

Read more less

These are some of the most fundamental and enduring questions we have about the mysteries of religion, and they may well hold the key to humankind's future on this earth. In this adaptation of Pascal Boyer's classic work exploring these concepts, Religion Explained, artist Joseph Béhé harnesses the power of comics to provide clear answers to the basic questions about why religion exists and why people believe. A distinguished scholar, Boyer drew from research in cognitive science, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology to explore why religion exists and why the strength of human beliefs can drive us to be selfless sometimes and, at other times, to be fanatical and intolerant. His erudite book is rich with insight into the endless jumble of ideas that inform religious beliefs and practices across cultures. With detailed, illustrative drawings and carefully adapted prose, Béhé's graphic novel brings a new perspective to Boyer's work. An eminently accessible approach to

Read more less

Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to “see smell” and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better know and control it. This book recovers the substantive role of the olfactory in Pre-Raphaelite art and Aestheticism.Christina Bradstreet examines the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Fragrant imagery in the work of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and others set the trend for the preoccupation with scent that informed swaths of British, European, and American art and design. Bradstreet’s rich analyses of paintings, perfume posters, and other works of visual culture demonstrate how artworks mirrored the “period nose” and intersected with the most clamorous debates of the day, including evolution, civilization, race, urban morality, mental health, faith, and the “woman question.”Beautifully illustrated and grounded in current practices in sensory history, Scented Visions presents both fresh readings of major works of art and a deeper understanding of the cultural history of nineteenth-century scent.

Read more less

Hua-yen is regarded as the highest form of Buddhism by most modern Japanese and Chinese scholars. This book is a description and analysis of the Chinese form of Buddhism called Hua-yen (or Hwa-yea), Flower Ornament, based largely on one of the more systematic treatises of its third patriarch. Hua-yen Buddhism strongly resembles Whitehead's process philosophy, and has strong implications for modern philosophy and religion. Hua-yen Buddhism explores the philosophical system of Hua-yen in greater detail than does Garma C.C. Chang's The Buddhist Teaching of Totality (Penn State, 1971). An additional value is the development of the questions of ethics and history. Thus, Professor Cook presents a valuable sequel to Professor Chang's pioneering work. The Flower Ornament School was developed in China in the late 7th and early 8th centuries as an innovative interpretation of Indian Buddhist doctrines in the light of indigenous Chinese presuppositions, chiefly Taoist. Hua-yen is a cosmic ecology, which views all existence as an organic unity, so it has an obvious appeal to the modern individual, both students and layman.

Read more less

The relationship between the City of Brotherly Love and its Black residents has been complicated from the city's founding through the present day. A Black Philadelphia Reader traces this complex history in the words of Black writers who were native to, lived in, or had significant connections to the city. Featuring the works of famous authorsincluding W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Sonia Sanchez and John Edgar Widemanalongside lesser-known voices, this reader is an immersive and enriching composite portrait of the Black experience in Philadelphia. Through fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, readers witness episodes of racial prejudice and gender inequality in areas like public health, housing, education, policing, criminal justice, and public transportation. And yet amid these myriad challenges, the writers convey an enduring faith, a love of family and community, and a hope that Philadelphia will fulfill its promises to its Black citizens. Thoughtfully introduced and accompa

Read more less

In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Régime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Régime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household. Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Régime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland focuses on several illustrated versions of the manuscript that contain historiated initials depicting simple scenes related to health care, such as patients' consultations with physicians, procedures like bloodletting, and foods and beverages recommended for good health. Borland argues that these imag

Read more less

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Xiamen’s pursuit of World Heritage Site designation from UNESCO stimulated considerable interest in the city’s Christian past. History enthusiasts, both Christian and non-Christian, devoted themselves to reinterpreting the legacy of missionaries and challenged official narratives of Christianity’s troubled associations with Western imperialism. In this book, Jifeng Liu documents the tension that has inevitably emerged between the established official history and these popular efforts.This volume elucidates the ways in which Christianity has become an integral part of Xiamen, a Chinese city profoundly influenced by Western missionaries. Drawing on extensive interviews, locally produced histories, and observations of historical celebrations, Liu provides an intimate portrait of the people who navigate ideological issues to reconstruct a Christian past, reproduce religious histories, and redefine local power structures in the shadow of the state. Liu makes a compelling argument that a Christian past is being constructed that combines official frameworks, unofficial practices, and nostalgia into social memory, a realm of dynamic negotiation that is neither dominated by the authoritarian state nor characterized by popular resistance. In this way, Negotiating the Christian Past in China illustrates the complexities of memory and missions in shaping the city’s cultural landscape, church-state dynamics, and global aspirations.This groundbreaking study assumes a perspective of globalization and localization, in both the past and the present, to better understand Chinese Christianity in a local, national, and global context. It will be welcomed by scholars of religious studies and world Christianity, and by those interested in the church-state relationship in China.

Read more less

Although Raphael has long been recognized as one of the great innovators of visionary painting (images of supernatural phenomena, including apparitions and prophetic visions), the full measure of his achievement in this area has never been taken. Vision and the Visionary in Raphael redresses this oversight by offering an expansive reading of these works within their contemporary artistic and religious contexts. At the center of the book is Raphael’s engagement with one of the critical conflicts in the Renaissance understanding of vision. Whereas artistic theory emphasized painting’s engagement with the physical world by way of the bodily eyes, religious images were generally intended to inspire their viewers to move from sensible appearances to the use of their “spiritual eyes” for contemplation of their god. For Raphael and his contemporaries, this double commitment to physical appearances and the spiritual dimensions of the image presented one of the greatest challenges of Renaissance religious art.

Read more less

In this book, Bob Becking provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the origins, lives, and eventual fate of the Yehudites, or Judeans, at Elephantine, framed within the greater history of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire. The Yehudites were among those mercenaries recruited by the Persians to defend the southwestern border of the empire in the fifth century BCE. Becking argues that this group, whom some label as the first “Jews,” lived on the island of Elephantine in relative peace with other ethnic groups under the aegis of the pax persica. Drawing on Aramaic and Demotic texts discovered during excavations on the island and at Syene on the adjacent shore of the Nile, Becking finds evidence of intermarriage, trade cooperation, and even a limited acceptance of one another’s gods between the various ethnic groups at Elephantine. His analysis of the Elephantine Yehudites’ unorthodox form of Yahwism provides valuable insight into the group’s religious beliefs and practices. An important contribution to the study of Yehudite life in the diaspora, this accessibly written and sweeping history enhances our understanding of the varieties of early Jewish life and how these contributed to the construction of Judaism.

Read more less

Coptic is the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in an alphabet derived primarily from Greek instead of hieroglyphs. It borrows some vocabulary from ancient Greek, and it was used primarily for writing Christian scriptures and treatises. There is no uniform Coptic language, but rather six major dialects.Unlike previous grammars that focus on just two of the Coptic dialects, this volume, written by senior Egyptologist James P. Allen, describes the grammar of the language in each of the six major dialects. It also includes exercises with an answer key, a chrestomathy, and an accompanying dictionary, making it suitable for teaching or self-guided learning as well as general reference.

Read more less

Theologians and Old Testament scholars have been at odds with respect to the best interpretation of the imago Dei. Theologians have preferred substantialistic (e.g., image as soul or mind) or relational interpretations (e.g., image as relational personhood) and Old Testament scholars have preferred functional interpretations (e.g., image as kingly dominion). The disagreements revolve around a number of exegetical questions. How do we best read Genesis 1 in its literary, historical, and cultural contexts? How should it be read theologically? How should we read Genesis 1 as a canonical text? This book charts a path through these disagreements by offering a dogmatically coherent and exegetically sound canonical interpretation of the image of God. Peterson argues that the fundamental claim of Genesis 1:26–28 is that humanity is created to image God actively in the world. “Made in the image of God” is an identity claim. As such, it tells us about humanity’s relationship with God and the rest of creation, what humanity does in the world, and what humanity is to become. Understanding the imago Dei as human identity has the further advantage of illuminating humanity’s ontology.Canonically, knowledge of the contours and purpose of human existence develops alongside God’s self-revelation. Tracing this development, Peterson demonstrates the coherence of the OT and NT texts that refer to the image of God. In the NT, Jesus Christ is understood as the realization of God’s image in the world and therefore the fulfillment of the description of humanity’s identity in Genesis 1. In addition to its specific focus on resolving interdisciplinary tensions for Christian interpretation of the imago Dei, the argument of the book has important implications for ethics, the doctrine of sin, and the doctrine of revelation.

Read more less

Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an avant-garde art movement; it was a living current of anti-authoritarian resistance.Featuring perspectives from scholars across the humanities and, distinctively, from contemporary surrealist practitioners, this volume examines surrealism’s role in postwar oppositional cultures. It demonstrates how surrealism’s committed engagement extends beyond the parameters of an artistic style or historical period, with chapters devoted to Afrosurrealism, Ted Joans, punk, the Situationist International, the student protests of May ’68, and other topics. Privileging interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and material culture approaches, contributors address surrealism’s interaction with New Left politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelia, and other subcultural trends around the globe. A revelatory work, Radical Dreams definitively shows that the surrealist movement was synonymous with cultural and political radicalism. It will be especially valuable to those interested in the avant-garde, contemporary art, and radical social movements.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, David Hopkins, Claire Howard, Michael Löwy, Alyce Mahon, Gavin Parkinson, Grégory Pierrot, Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman.

Read more less

“Alice was always beautiful—Armenian immigrant beautiful, with thick, curly black hair, olive skin, and big dark eyes,” writes Dana Walrath. Alice also has Alzheimer’s, and while she can remember all the songs from The Music Man, she can no longer attend to the basics of caring for herself. Alice moves to live with her daughter, Dana, in Vermont, and the story begins. Aliceheimer’s is a series of illustrated vignettes, daily glimpses into their world with Alzheimer’s. Walrath’s time with her mother was marked by humor and clarity: “With a community of help that included pirates, good neighbors, a cast of characters from space-time travel, and my dead father hovering in the branches of the maple trees that surround our Vermont farmhouse, Aliceheimer’s let us write our own story daily—a story that, in turn, helps rewrite the dominant medical narrative of aging.” In drawing Alice, Walrath literally enrobes her with cut-up pages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She weaves elements from Lewis Carroll’s classic throughout her text, using evocative phrases from the novel to introduce the vignettes, such as “Disappearing Alice,” “Missing Pieces,” “Falling Slowly,” “Curiouser and Curiouser,” and “A Mad Tea Party.” Walrath writes that creating this book allowed her not only to process her grief over her mother’s dementia, but also “to remember the magic laughter of that time.” Graphic medicine, she writes, “lets us better understand those who are hurting, feel their stories, and redraw and renegotiate those social boundaries. Most of all, it gives us a way to heal and to fly over the world as Alice does.” In the end, Aliceheimer’s is indeed strangely and utterly uplifting.

Read more less

In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of “Europeanization.”Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.

Read more less

A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to “naturalize” sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.Assembling evidence from diverse realms—visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts—this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent’s paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent’s friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.

Read more less

The title of this book refers to the classic time and place for magic, witchcraft, and divination in Russia. The Bathhouse at Midnight, by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, surveys all forms of magic, both learned and popular, in Russia from the fifth to the eighteenth century. While no book on the subject could be exhaustive, The Bathhouse at Midnight does describe and assess all the literary sources of magic, witchcraft, astrology, alchemy, and divination from Kiev Rus and Imperial Russia, and to some extent Ukraine and Belorussia. Where possible, Ryan identifies the sources of the texts (usually Greek, Arabic, or West European) and makes parallels to other cultures, ranging from classical antiquity to Finnic. He finds that Russia shares most of its magic and divination with the rest of Europe.Subjects covered include the Evil Eye, the Number of the Beast, omens, dreams, talismans and amulets, plants, gemstones, and other materials thought to possess magic properties. The first chapter gives a historical overview, and the final chapter summarizes the political, religious, and legal aspects of the history of magic in Russia. The author also provides translations of some key texts.The Bathhouse at Midnight will be invaluable for anyone—student, teacher, or general reader—with an interest in Russia, magic, or the occult. It is unique in its field and is set to become the definitive study of Russian magic.

Read more less

During the third millennium BC, the huge geographical area stretching between the Mediterranean in the west and the Indus Valley in the east witnessed the rise of a commercial network of unmatched proportions and intensity, within which the Persian Gulf for long periods functioned as a central node. In this book, Laursen and Steinkeller examine the nature of cultural and commercial contacts between Babylonia, the Gulf region, and Indus Civilization. Focusing on the third and early second millennia BC, and using both archaeological data and the evidence of ancient written sources, their study offers an up-to-date synthetic picture of the history of interactions across this vast region. In addition to giving detailed characterizations and evaluations of contacts in various periods, the book also treats a number of important related issues, such as the presence of Amorites in the Gulf (in particular, their role in the rise of the Tilmun center on Bahrain Island); the alleged existence of Meluhhan commercial outposts in Babylonia; and the role that the seaport of Gu’abba played in Babylonia’s interactions with the Gulf region and southeastern Iran.

Read more less

The Hebrew Scriptures consider the exodus from Egypt to be Israel’s formative and foundational event. Indeed, the Bible offers no other explanation for Israel’s origin as a people. It is also true that no contemporary record regarding a man named Moses or the Israelites generally, either living in or leaving Egypt has been found. Hence, many biblical scholars and archaeologists take a skeptical attitude, dismissing the exodus from the realm of history. However, the contributors to this volume are convinced that there is an alternative, more positive approach. Using textual and archaeological materials from the ancient Near East in a comparative way, in conjunction with the Torah’s narratives and with other biblical texts, the contributors to this volume (specialists in ancient Egypt, ancient Near Eastern culture and history, and biblical studies) maintain that the reports in the Hebrew Bible should not be cavalierly dismissed for ideological reasons but, rather, should be deemed to contain authentic memories.

Read more less