Search results for ""harvard university press""

Building on Dawkins’s classic, The Extended Phenotype, physiological ecologist Turner shows why drawing the boundary of an organism’s physiology at the skin is arbitrary. He argues that the structures animals build are better regarded not as frozen behaviors but as external organs of physiology and even extensions of the animal’s phenotype.

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The Latin psalms—translated into Old English—figured prominently in the lives of Anglo-Saxons, whether sung by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning, or recited in private devotion by lay people. The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time.

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Describing an era of exploration during the Renaissance that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield.

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This edition brings the research university into the 21st century. The multiversity that Clark Kerr discovered now finds itself in an age of apprehension with few certainties. Kerr gives five general points of advice on what kinds of attitudes universities should adopt.

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Toward a Feminist Theory of the State presents Catharine MacKinnon’s powerful analysis of politics, sexuality, and the law from the perspective of women. Using the debate over Marxism and feminism as a point of departure, MacKinnon develops a theory of gender centered on sexual subordination and applies it to the state. The result is an informed and compelling critique of inequality and a transformative vision of a direction for social change.

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In a remarkable book based on prodigious research, Morton J. Horwitz offers a sweeping overview of the emergence of a national (and modern) legal system from English and colonial antecedents. He treats the evolution of the common law as intellectual history and also demonstrates how the shifting views of private law became a dynamic element in the economic growth of the United States.Horwitz's subtle and sophisticated explanation of societal change begins with the common law, which was intended to provide justice for all. The great breakpoint came after 1790 when the law was slowly transformed to favor economic growth and development. The courts spurred economic competition instead of circumscribing it. This new instrumental law flourished as the legal profession and the mercantile elite forged a mutually beneficial alliance to gain wealth and power.The evolving law of the early republic interacted with political philosophy, Horwitz shows. The doctrine of laissez-faire, long considered the cloak for competition, is here seen as a shield for the newly rich. By the 1840s the overarching reach of the doctrine prevented further distribution of wealth and protected entrenched classes by disallowing the courts very much power to intervene in economic life.This searching interpretation, which connects law and the courts to the real world, will engage historians in a new debate. For to view the law as an engine of vast economic transformation is to challenge in a stunning way previous interpretations of the eras of revolution and reform.

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Interviews hold a prominent place among the various research methods in the social and behavioral sciences. This book presents a powerful critique of current views and techniques, and proposes a new approach to interviewing. At the heart of Elliot Mishler’s argument is the notion that an interview is a type of discourse, a speech event: it is a joint product, shaped and organized by asking and answering questions.This view may seem self-evident, yet it does not guide most interview research. In the mainstream tradition, the discourse is suppressed. Questions and answers are regarded as analogues to stimuli and responses rather than as forms of speech; questions and the interviewer’s behavior are standardized so that all respondents will receive the same “stimulus”; respondents’ social and personal contexts of meaning are ignored. While many researchers now recognize that context must be taken into account, the question of how to do so effectively has not been resolved. This important book illustrates how to implement practical alternatives to standard interviewing methods.Drawing on current work in sociolinguistics as well as on his own extensive experience conducting interviews, Mishler shows how interviews can be analyzed and interpreted as narrative accounts. He places interviewing in a sociocultural context and examines the effects on respondents of different types of interviewing practice. The respondents themselves, he believes, should be granted a more extensive role as participants and collaborators in the research process.The book is an elegant work of synthesis—clearly and persuasively written, and supported by concrete examples of both standard interviewing and alternative methods. It will be of interest to both scholars and clinicians in all the various fields for which the interview is an essential tool.

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Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book seeks to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life.Thompson surveys ethical conflicts of public officials over a range of political issues, including nuclear deterrence, foreign intervention, undercover investigation, bureaucratic negligence, campaign finance, the privacy of officials, health care, welfare paternalism, drug and safety regulation, and social experimentation. He views these conflicts from the perspectives of many different kinds of public officials—elected and appointed executives at several levels of government, administrators, judges, legislators, governmental advisers, and even doctors, lawyers, social workers, and journalists whose professional roles often thrust them into public life.In clarifying the ethical problems faced by officials, Thompson combines theoretical analysis with practical prescription, and begins to define a field of inquiry for which many have said there is a need but to which few have yet contributed. Philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, lawyers, and other professionals interested in ethics in government will gain insight from this book.

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Even the demonic Hitler had a comprehensive philosophy, and Eberhard Jäckel probes deeply into the dictator’s mind to determine how he viewed the world.

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In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America’s heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, puts it, “is something only assistant professors assume.” Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. Lear’s exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stake—the psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.

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In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.

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Feminist philosophers have made important strides in altering the overwhelmingly male-centric discipline of philosophy. Yet, in Nancy Bauer’s view, most are still content to work within theoretical frameworks that are fundamentally false to human beings’ everyday experiences. This is particularly intolerable for a species of philosophy whose central aspiration is to make the world a less sexist place. How to Do Things with Pornography models a new way to write philosophically about pornography, women’s self-objectification, hook-up culture, and other contemporary phenomena. Unafraid to ask what philosophy contributes to our lives, Bauer argues that the profession’s lack of interest in this question threatens to make its enterprise irrelevant.Bauer criticizes two paradigmatic models of Western philosophizing: the Great Man model, according to which philosophy is the product of rare genius; and the scientistic model, according to which a community of researchers works together to discover once-and-for-all truths. The philosopher’s job is neither to perpetuate the inevitably sexist trope of the philosopher-genius nor to “get things right.” Rather, it is to compete with the Zeitgeist and attract people to the endeavor of reflecting on their settled ways of perceiving and understanding the world.How to Do Things with Pornography boldly enlists J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, showing that it should be read not as a theory of speech acts but as a revolutionary conception of what philosophers can do in the world with their words.

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Many westerners used to call the Soviet Union "Russia." Russians too regarded it as their country, but that did not mean they were entirely happy with it. In the end, in fact, Russia actually destroyed the Soviet Union. How did this happen, and what kind of Russia emerged?In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. One of the keys lies in messianism--the idea rooted in Russian Orthodoxy that the Russians were a "chosen people." The communists reshaped this notion into messianic socialism, in which the Soviet order would lead the world in a new direction. Neither vision, however, fit the "community spirit" of the Russian people, and the resulting clash defined the Soviet world.Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. He discusses the severe dislocations resulting from collectivization and industrialization; the relationship between ethnic Russians and other Soviet peoples; the dramatic effects of World War II on ideas of homeland and patriotism; the separation of "Russian" and "Soviet" culture; leadership and the cult of personality; and the importance of technology in the Soviet world view.At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire. There is no surer guide than Geoffrey Hosking to reveal the historical forces forging Russian identity in the post-communist world.

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There is perhaps no superior edition of Donne’s Songs and Sonets than Theodore Redpath’s wonderful annotated volume. Out of print for a decade, the book is reprinted here in its second, revised edition. The book’s twofold origin is evident on every page of Redpath’s limpid commentary: it arises partly out of a life of scholarship and partly from Redpath’s experiences and concerns as a teacher. The volume contains notes “on every point likely to cause difficulty to a reader of average intelligence.”

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Leonard Friesen presents a study of the transformation of New Russia—the region north of the Black and Azov seas—from its conquest by the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century to the revolutionary tumult of 1905. Friesen is particularly interested in the dynamic and multifaceted relations between the region’s peasants, European colonists, and Russian estate owners. He gives special attention to the settlement process whereby once free peasants were enserfed within a generation, as well as the period of servile emancipation after 1861, when the paths of the region’s agriculturalists converged in unexpected ways. Overall, Friesen sees the region as vital to an understanding of the empire as a whole. He demonstrates how peasants, nobles, and estate owners were key actors in a series of rural revolutions that eventually threatened the empire itself.This book contributes to our understanding of Imperial Russia, as well as contemporary Ukraine, by describing and analyzing rural developmental patterns over time. It explores how, when, and why agriculturalists made adjustments to long-established agrarian and social practices, and provides a fresh perspective on the link between the end of empire and the rural developments that preceded it.

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A gathering of poetic blossoms.The Greek Anthology contains some 4,500 short Greek poems in the sparkling and diverse genre of epigram, written by more than a hundred poets and collected over many centuries. To the original collection, called the Garland (Stephanus) by its contributing editor, Meleager of Gadara (first century BC), was added another Garland, by Philip of Thessalonica (mid-first century AD) and then a Cycle by Agathias of Myrina (AD 567/8). In about AD 900 these collections (now lost) and perhaps others (also lost, by Rufinus, Diogenianus, Strato, and Palladas) were partly incorporated and arranged into fifteen books according to subject by Constantine Cephalas; most of his collection is preserved in a manuscript called the Palatine Anthology. A second manuscript, the Planudean Anthology made by Maximus Planudes in 1301, contains additional epigrams omitted by Cephalas.Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, and Paulus Silentiarius.This Loeb edition of The Greek Anthology replaces the earlier edition by W. R. Paton, with a Greek text and ample notes reflecting current scholarship. Volume I contains the following: Book 1. Christian Epigrams; Book 2. Description of the Statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus; Book 3. Epigrams in the Temple of Apollonis at Cyzicus; Book 4. Prefaces to Various Anthologies; Book 5. Erotic Epigrams.

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An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

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Adventurous history.Quintus Curtius was apparently a rhetorician who lived in the first century of the Roman empire and, early in the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54), wrote a history of Alexander the Great in ten books in clear and picturesque style for Latin readers. The first two books have not survived—our narrative begins with events in 333 BC—and there is material missing from books 5, 6, and 10. One of his main sources is Cleitarchus who, about 300 BC, had made Alexander’s career a matter of marvelous adventure. Curtius is not a critical historian; and in his desire to entertain and to stress the personality of Alexander, he elaborates effective scenes, omits much that is important for history, and does not worry about chronology. But he does not invent things, except speeches and letters inserted into the narrative by traditional habit. “I copy more than I believe,” he says. Three features of his story are narrative of exciting experiences, development of a hero’s character, and a disposition to moralize. His history is one of the five extant works on which we rely for the career of Alexander the Great. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Quintus Curtius is in two volumes.

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The paramount historian of the early Roman empire.Tacitus (Cornelius), famous Roman historian, was born in AD 55, 56 or 57 and lived to about 120. He became an orator, married in 77 a daughter of Julius Agricola before Agricola went to Britain, was quaestor in 81 or 82, a senator under the Flavian emperors, and a praetor in 88. After four years' absence he experienced the terrors of Emperor Domitian's last years and turned to historical writing. He was a consul in 97. Close friend of the younger Pliny, with him he successfully prosecuted Marius Priscus. Works: (i) Life and Character of Agricola, written in 97–98, specially interesting because of Agricola's career in Britain. (ii) Germania (98–99), an equally important description of the geography, anthropology, products, institutions, and social life and the tribes of the Germans as known to the Romans. (iii) Dialogue on Oratory (Dialogus), of unknown date; a lively conversation about the decline of oratory and education. (iv) Histories (probably issued in parts from 105 onwards), a great work originally consisting of at least twelve books covering the period AD 69–96, but only Books 1–4 and part of Book 5 survive, dealing in detail with the dramatic years 69–70. (v) Annals, Tacitus's other great work, originally covering the period AD 14–68 (Emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero) and published between 115 and about 120. Of sixteen books at least, there survive Books 1–4 (covering the years 14–28); a bit of Book 5 and all Book 6 (31–37); part of Book 11 (from 47); Books 12–15 and part of Book 16 (to 66). Tacitus is renowned for his development of a pregnant concise style, character study, and psychological analysis, and for the often terrible story which he brilliantly tells. As a historian of the early Roman empire he is paramount. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Tacitus is in five volumes.

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Belles lettres.Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallo-Roman, was born at Lugdunum (Lyon) about AD 430. He married Papianilla, daughter of the Emperor Avitus in whose honor he recited at Rome on 1 January 456 a panegyric in verse. Sidonius later joined a rebellion, it seems, but was finally reconciled to the emperor Majorian and delivered at Lyon in 458 a panegyric on him. After some years in his native land, in 467 he led a Gallo-Roman deputation to the Emperor Anthemius, and on 1 January 468 recited at Rome his third panegyric. He returned to Gaul in 469 and became Bishop of Auvergne with seat at Clermont-Ferrand. He upheld his people in resisting the Visigoths. After Auvergne was ceded to them in 475, he was imprisoned but soon resumed his bishopric. He was canonized after his death. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Sidonius is in two volumes. The first contains his poetry: the three long panegyrics, and poems addressed to or concerned with friends, apparently written in his youth. Volume I also contains Books 1–2 of his Letters (all dating from before his episcopate); Books 3–9 are in Volume II. Sidonius’ writings shed valued light on Roman culture in the fifth century.

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Winner of the 2020 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic WritingNearly 1,600 Americans are still unaccounted for and presumed dead from the Vietnam War. These are the stories of those who mourn and continue to search for them.For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans—and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war.Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

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In the early 1140s, the Bavarian princess Bertha von Sulzbach arrived in Constantinople to marry the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos. Wanting to learn more about her new homeland, the future empress Eirene commissioned the grammarian Ioannes Tzetzes to compose a version of the Iliad as an introduction to Greek literature and culture. He drafted a lengthy dodecasyllable poem in twenty-four books, reflecting the divisions of the Iliad, that combined summaries of the events of the siege of Troy with allegorical interpretations. To make the Iliad relevant to his Christian audience, Tzetzes reinterpreted the pagan gods from various allegorical perspectives. As historical allegory (or euhemerism), the gods are simply ancient kings erroneously deified by the pagan poet; as astrological allegory, they become planets whose position and movement affect human life; as moral allegory Athena represents wisdom, Aphrodite desire.As a didactic explanation of pagan ancient Greek culture to Orthodox Christians, the work is deeply rooted in the mid-twelfth-century circumstances of the cosmopolitan Comnenian court. As a critical reworking of the Iliad, it must also be seen as part of the millennia-long and increasingly global tradition of Homeric adaptation.

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In this impressive study, David Rich demonstrates how the modernization of Russia's general staff during the second half of the nineteenth century reshaped its intellectual and strategic outlook and equipped the staff to play a strong, and at times dominant, role in shaping Russian foreign policy.Rich weaves together several levels of narrative to show how the increasingly sophisticated, scientific, and positivistic work attitudes and habits of the general staff acculturated younger officers, redefining their relationship with, and responsibilities to, the state. In time, this new generation of officers projected their characteristic notions onto the state and onto autocracy itself; professional concern for the security of the state eclipsed traditional unquestioning loyalty to the regime. Rich goes on to show how divergence between diplomatic and military aims among those responsible for making strategy cost the state dearly in terms of economic stability and international standing.The author supports his findings with original research in Russian foreign policy and military archives and wide reading in published sources. The Tsar's Colonels contributes to a number of debates in Russian military and social history and offers new insights on the structural roots of the Great War, and on the theoretical problems of modernization and professionalization.

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The time has come to reform philosophy, says Hilary Putnam, one of America’s great philosophers. He calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. Putnam’s goal is to embed philosophy in social life.The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists on describing both the mind and the world from a God’s-eye view. In its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made world, and philosophy should not be in that business either.The author moves on to show that the larger human context in which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to Quine and Goodman.This book connects issues in metaphysics with cultural and literary issues and argues that the collapse of philosophical realism does not entail a fall into the abyss of relativism and postmodern skepticism. It is aimed primarily at philosophers but should appeal to a wide range of humanists and social scientists.

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Unique among Western democracies in refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the United States has attempted instead to reform and rationalize state death penalty practices through federal constitutional law. Courting Death traces the unusual and distinctive history of top-down judicial regulation of capital punishment under the Constitution and its unanticipated consequences for our time.In the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of widespread abolition of the death penalty around the world, provisions for capital punishment that had long fallen under the purview of the states were challenged in federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened in two landmark decisions, first by constitutionally invalidating the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972) on the grounds that it was capricious and discriminatory, followed four years later by restoring it in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Since then, by neither retaining capital punishment in unfettered form nor abolishing it outright, the Supreme Court has created a complex regulatory apparatus that has brought executions in many states to a halt, while also failing to address the problems that led the Court to intervene in the first place.While execution chambers remain active in several states, constitutional regulation has contributed to the death penalty’s new fragility. In the next decade or two, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue, the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment. Courting Death illuminates both the promise and pitfalls of constitutional regulation of contentious social issues.

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Virtues of Thought is an excursion through interconnecting philosophical topics in Plato and Aristotle, under the expert guidance of Aryeh Kosman. Exploring what these two foundational figures have to say about the nature of human awareness and understanding, Kosman concludes that ultimately the virtues of thought are to be found in the joys and satisfactions that come from thinking philosophically, whether we engage in it ourselves or witness others’ participation.Kosman examines Aristotle’s complex understanding of the role that reason plays in practical choice and moral deliberation, and the specific forms of thinking that are involved in explaining the world and making it intelligible to ourselves and others. Critical issues of consciousness and the connection between thinking and acting in Aristotle’s philosophical psychology lead to a discussion of the importance of emotion in his theory of virtue. Theories of perception and cognition are highlighted in works such as Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. When his focus turns to Plato, Kosman gives original accounts of several dialogues concerning Plato’s treatment of love, self-knowledge, justice, and the complex virtue known as sophrosyne in such texts as Charmides and the Republic.Bringing together in a single volume previously unpublished essays along with classics in the field, Virtues of Thought makes a significant contribution to our study of ancient Greek philosophy.

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Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism and lawlessness. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Terror are only symptoms of deeper pathologies. ­Ackerman points to a series of developments that have previously been treated independently of one another—from the rise of presidential primaries, to the role of pollsters and media gurus, to the centralization of power in White House czars, to the politicization of the military, to the manipulation of constitutional doctrine to justify presidential power-grabs. He shows how these different transformations can interact to generate profound constitutional crises in the twenty-first century—and then proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward. The book aims to begin a new constitutional debate. Americans should not suppose that Barack Obama’s centrism and constitutionalism will typify the presidencies of the twenty-first century. We should seize the present opportunity to confront deeper institutional pathologies before it is too late.

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Plato’s frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato’s hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction—Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.

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When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. This paradox--the need both to accept and to refuse sexual difference in politics--was the constitutive condition of the long struggle by women to gain the right of citizenship. In this new book, remarkable in both its findings and its methodology, award-winning historian Joan Wallach Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox of sexual difference.Focusing on four French feminist activists--Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen during the French Revolution; Jeanne Deroin, a utopian socialist and candidate for legislative office in 1848; Hubertine Auclert, the suffragist of the Third Republic; and Madeleine Pelletier, a psychiatrist in the early twentieth century who argued that women must "virilize" themselves in order to gain equality--Scott charts the repetitions and variations in feminist history. Again and again, feminists tried to prove they were individuals, according to the standards of individuality of their day. Again and again, they confronted the assumption that individuals were men. But when sexual difference was taken to be a fundamental difference, when only men were regarded as individuals and thus as citizens, how could women also be citizens? The imaginative and courageous answers feminists offered to these questions are the subject of this engaging book.

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Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.This book is a celebration of the masses—their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by “the ostentatious display of surface.”With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays continue to shed light not only on Kracauer’s later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced him—including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Weimar intellectuals—and provides the context necessary for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interpreters of modern life.

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The fundamental texts of the great classical period in modern logic, some of them never before available in English translation, are here gathered together for the first time. Modern logic, heralded by Leibniz, may be said to have been initiated by Boole, De Morgan, and Jevons, but it was the publication in 1879 of Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift that opened a great epoch in the history of logic by presenting, in full-fledged form, the propositional calculus and quantification theory.Frege’s book, translated in its entirety, begins the present volume. The emergence of two new fields, set theory and foundations of mathematics, on the borders of logic, mathematics, and philosophy, is depicted by the texts that follow. Peano and Dedekind illustrate the trend that led to Principia Mathematica. Burali-Forti, Cantor, Russell, Richard, and König mark the appearance of the modern paradoxes. Hilbert, Russell, and Zermelo show various ways of overcoming these paradoxes and initiate, respectively, proof theory, the theory of types, and axiomatic set theory. Skolem generalizes Löwenheim’s theorem, and he and Fraenkel amend Zermelo’s axiomatization of set theory, while von Neumann offers a somewhat different system. The controversy between Hubert and Brouwer during the twenties is presented in papers of theirs and in others by Weyl, Bernays, Ackermann, and Kolmogorov. The volume concludes with papers by Herbrand and by Gödel, including the latter’s famous incompleteness paper.Of the forty-five contributions here collected all but five are presented in extenso. Those not originally written in English have been translated with exemplary care and exactness; the translators are themselves mathematical logicians as well as skilled interpreters of sometimes obscure texts. Each paper is introduced by a note that sets it in perspective, explains its importance, and points out difficulties in interpretation. Editorial comments and footnotes are interpolated where needed, and an extensive bibliography is included.

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A nation's buildings are a record of the character and aspirations of its people. In a rich blend of social and architectural history, Abbott Lowell Cummings reconstructs, through text and pictures, the framed houses of Massachusetts Bay that reflect the straightforward honesty of our earliest northern settlers and their profound love of craftsmanship.A substantial number of the nation's seventeenth-century houses have been preserved in Massachusetts, and Cummings provides illustrations for a majority of them. He describes the dwellings in detail, and includes architectural drawings that were especially commissioned for this book. He demonstrates that the builders were far more sophisticated than previously imagined and that, while maintaining their English timber-building traditions, they were astonishingly adaptable to their new environment.Beyond the houses themselves, Cummings discusses evolutions in pioneer life. The most simple kinds of changes in architecture, Cummings shows, indicated singular changes in family living. Such additions as kitchens and parlors, or the moving of the master bedroom to a second floor, suggest shifts in the private and social lives of families.The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay is a splendid story of innovations— of restless, migratory people and their architectural and social responses to the heavily forested New World. It is the first chapter in the long saga of America's preoccupation with technology as it affected the early American home.

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The diversity of living forms and the unity of evolutionary processes are themes that have permeated the research and writing of Ernst Mayr, a Grand Master of evolutionary biology. The essays collected here are among his most valuable and durable: contributions that form the basis for much of the contemporary understanding of evolutionary biology.

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The Old English Boethius boldly refashions in Anglo-Saxon guise a great literary monument of the late-antique world, The Consolation of Philosophy. Condemned to death for treason around 525 ce, the Roman scholar Boethius turned to philosophy to transform his personal distress into a powerful meditation on fate, free will, and the human capacity for virtue in a flawed, fallen world. Boethius's Latin dialogues found a receptive audience in Anglo-Saxon England, where they were translated into Old English some time around 900. The translator (traditionally identified with King Alfred) freely adapts the Latin for a new audience: the Roman Fabricius, for example, becomes the Germanic weapon-smith Weland. The translation replicates Boethius’s alternation of prose and verse—only in this case Old English prose alternates with alliterative verse.In later centuries Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth each turned The Consolation of Philosophy into English, but the Old English translation was the first to bring it to a wider vernacular audience. Verse prologues and epilogues for works traditionally associated with King Alfred fill out the volume, offering readers a fascinating glimpse of the moment when English confidently claimed its birthright as a literature capable of anything, from sublime ideas to subtle poetry.

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Nuclear bombs in suitcases, anthrax bacilli in ventilators, tsunamis and meteors, avian flu, scorchingly hot temperatures: nightmares that were once the plot of Hollywood movies are now frighteningly real possibilities. How can we steer a path between willful inaction and reckless overreaction?Cass Sunstein explores these and other worst-case scenarios and how we might best prevent them in this vivid, illuminating, and highly original analysis. Singling out the problems of terrorism and climate change, Sunstein explores our susceptibility to two opposite and unhelpful reactions: panic and utter neglect. He shows how private individuals and public officials might best respond to low-probability risks of disaster—emphasizing the need to know what we will lose from precautions as well as from inaction. Finally, he offers an understanding of the uses and limits of cost–benefit analysis, especially when current generations are imposing risks on future generations.Throughout, Sunstein uses climate change as a defining case, because it dramatically illustrates the underlying principles. But he also discusses terrorism, depletion of the ozone layer, genetic modification of food, hurricanes, and worst-case scenarios faced in our ordinary lives. Sunstein concludes that if we can avoid the twin dangers of overreaction and apathy, we will be able to ameliorate if not avoid future catastrophes, retaining our sanity as well as scarce resources that can be devoted to more constructive ends.

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In this deeply thoughtful book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl turns a critical lens on prejudice. Surveying the study of prejudice since World War II, Young-Bruehl suggests an approach that distinguishes between different types of prejudices, the people who hold them, the social and political settings that promote them, and the human needs they fulfill. Startling, challenging, and courageous, this work offers an unprecedented analysis of prejudice.

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According to the national mythology, the United States has long opened its doors to people from across the globe, providing a port in a storm and opportunity for any who seek it. Yet the history of immigration to the United States is far different. Even before the xenophobic reaction against European and Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth century, social and economic interest groups worked to manipulate immigration policy to serve their needs. In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building.A Nation by Design argues that the engineering of immigration policy has been prevalent since early American history. However, it has gone largely unnoticed since it took place primarily on the local and state levels, owing to constitutional limits on federal power during the slavery era. Zolberg profiles the vacillating currents of opinion on immigration throughout American history, examining separately the roles played by business interests, labor unions, ethnic lobbies, and nativist ideologues in shaping policy. He then examines how three different types of migration--legal migration, illegal migration to fill low-wage jobs, and asylum-seeking--are shaping contemporary arguments over immigration to the United States.A Nation by Design is a thorough, authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. With rich detail and impeccable scholarship, Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.

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Asked to name an insect society, most of us--whether casual or professional students of nature--quickly point to one of the so-called eusocial marvels: the ant colony, the beehive, the termite mound, the wasp nest. Each is awe-inspiring in its division of labor--collective defense, foraging, and nestbuilding. Yet E. O. Wilson cautioned back in 1971 that sociality should be defined more broadly, "in order to prevent the arbitrary exclusion of many interesting phenomena." Thirty-five years later, James T. Costa gives those interesting phenomena their due. He argues that, in trying to solve the puzzle of how highly eusocial behaviors evolved in a few insect orders, evolutionary biologists have neglected the more diverse social arrangements in the remaining twenty-eight orders--insect societies that don't fit the eusocial schema. Costa synthesizes here for the first time the scattered literature about social phenomena across the arthropod phylum: beetles and bugs, caterpillars and cockroaches, mantids and membracids, sawflies and spiders. This wide-ranging tour takes a rich narrative approach that interweaves theory and data analysis with the behavior and ecology of these remarkable groups. This comprehensive treatment is likely to inspire a new generation of naturalists to take a closer look.

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We are connected to distant space and time not only by our imaginations but also through a common cosmic heritage. Emerging now from modern science is a unified scenario of the cosmos, including ourselves as sentient beings, based on the time-honored concept of change. From galaxies to snowflakes, from stars and planets to life itself, we are beginning to identify an underlying ubiquitous pattern penetrating the fabric of all the natural sciences--a sweepingly encompassing view of the order and structure of every known class of object in our richly endowed universe. This is the subject of Eric Chaisson's new book. In Cosmic Evolution Chaisson addresses some of the most basic issues we can contemplate: the origin of matter and the origin of life, and the ways matter, life, and radiation interact and change with time. Guided by notions of beauty and symmetry, by the search for simplicity and elegance, by the ambition to explain the widest range of phenomena with the fewest possible principles, Chaisson designs for us an expansive yet intricate model depicting the origin and evolution of all material structures. He shows us that neither new science nor appeals to nonscience are needed to understand the impressive hierarchy of the cosmic evolutionary story, from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind.

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Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize, Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New JerseyFinalist, George Washington PrizeA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015Generations of students have been taught that the American Revolution was a revolt against royal tyranny. In this revisionist account, Eric Nelson argues that a great many of our “founding fathers” saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. The Royalist Revolution interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favor of royal power—driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.“The Royalist Revolution is a thought-provoking book, and Nelson is to be commended for reviving discussion of the complex ideology of the American Revolution. He reminds us that there was a spectrum of opinion even among the most ardent patriots and a deep British influence on the political institutions of the new country.”—Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Wall Street Journal“A scrupulous archaeology of American revolutionary thought.”—Thomas Meaney, The Nation“A powerful double-barrelled challenge to historiographical orthodoxy.”—Colin Kidd, London Review of Books“[A] brilliant and provocative analysis of the American Revolution.”—John Brewer, New York Review of Books

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The Platonic ideal of government.Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family ca. 427 BC. In early life an admirer of Socrates, Plato later founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, among whose many notable alumni was Aristotle. Traditionally ascribed to Plato are thirty-six dialogues developing Socrates’ dialectic method and composed with great stylistic virtuosity, together with thirteen letters.Republic, a masterpiece of philosophical and political thought, concerns righteousness both in individuals and in communities, and proposes an ideal state organized and governed on philosophical principles. This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition by Paul Shorey, offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.

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An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

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The first comprehensive history of early Christianity.Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. AD 260–340), born in Palestine, was a student of the presbyter Pamphilus, whom he loyally supported during Diocletian’s persecution. He was himself imprisoned in Egypt, but became Bishop of Caesarea around 314. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 he sat by the emperor, led a party of moderates, and made the first draft of the famous creed. Of Eusebius’ many learned publications we have the Martyrs of Palestine and the Life of Constantine; several apologetic and polemic works; parts of his commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah; and the Chronographia, known chiefly in Armenian and Syriac versions of the original Greek. But Eusebius’ chief fame rests on the History of the Christian Church in ten books, published in 324–325, the most important ecclesiastical history of ancient times, a great treasury of knowledge about the early Church.

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This volume, Paul Grice’s first book, includes the long-delayed publication of his enormously influential 1967 William James Lectures. But there is much, much more in this work. Grice himself has carefully arranged and framed the sequence of essays to emphasize not a certain set of ideas but a habit of mind, a style of philosophizing.Grice has, to be sure, provided philosophy with crucial ideas. His account of speaker-meaning is the standard that others use to define their own minor divergences or future elaborations. His discussion of conversational implicatures has given philosophers an important tool for the investigation of all sorts of problems; it has also laid the foundation for a great deal of work by other philosophers and linguists about presupposition. His metaphysical defense of absolute values is starting to be considered the beginning of a new phase in philosophy. This is a vital book for all who are interested in Anglo-American philosophy.

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