bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Intelligibility and Metaphysics
Authors: de Regt Henk W.
Published: August 2017

This chapter investigates the relation between metaphysical worldviews and scientific understanding, by means of a historical case study of theories of gravitation. It analyzes the famous debate between Isaac Newton and his contemporaries (notably Christiaan Huygens) about the alleged unintelligibility of Newton’s theory of gravitation, and the subsequent development of physicists’ views on contact action versus action at a distance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Metaphysics played an important part in these debates, and physicists’ metaphysical commitments and their views on the intelligibility of theories were intricately related. The chapter first presents a descriptive account of the historical case, and subsequently analyzes it in terms of the contextual theory of scientific understanding. This theory connects understanding and metaphysics in a way that explains the variation in intelligibility standards. The chapter concludes with some general reflections on the relation between metaphysical worldviews and scientific understanding.
Conclusion
Authors: de Regt Henk W.
Published: August 2017

The contextual theory of scientific understanding developed and defended in this book serves as a basis for specific philosophical theories of explanation that start from the assumption that explanations should give us understanding, and as a general description and explanation of the historical variation of criteria for understanding employed by scientists in actual practice. This concluding chapter reflects on the results of the investigation by addressing three questions. First, what is the scope of the contextual theory of scientific understanding? Is it restricted to the natural sciences, or does it apply more broadly? In this context, the theory’s relation to the debate about explanation versus understanding in the humanities is discussed briefly. Second, does the theory imply a relativist philosophy of science? Third, can it serve as a basis for normative appraisal of scientific achievements?
Music and Emotion
Authors: Zbikowski Lawrence M.
Published: August 2017

This chapter explores the relationship between music and emotion, beginning with a review of research on emotion, followed by a review of research on music and emotion. It is proposed that the connection between music and the emotions reflects music’s capacity to provide sonic analogs for some of the most salient aspects of emotion processes. This proposal is illustrated through analyses of two movements from J. S. Bach’s cantata “Ich habe genug,” which make explicit two important features of musical grammar: syntactic processes and syntactic layers. The chapter concludes with observations about the ways music is used to shape emotional responses within liturgical settings of the kind that motivated and framed Bach’s cantata.
Music and Gesture
Authors: Zbikowski Lawrence M.
Published: August 2017

This chapter explores the relationship between music and physical gesture, drawing on recent research on the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech. Such gestures appear to be motivated by thought processes that are independent from speech and that in many cases offer analogs for dynamic processes. The chapter outlines the infrastructure for human communication that supports language and gesture as well as music. This outline provides a framework for exploring how music and gesture are similar and for how they are different. These comparisons are made through analyses of the movements Fred Astaire makes while accompanying himself at the piano in the 1936 film Swing Time and those Charlie Chaplin makes to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5 in the 1941 film The Great Dictator. These analyses further explicate the role of syntactic processes and syntactic layers in musical grammar and introduce referential frameworks, which serve as perceptual anchors for syntactic processes.
Music and Dance
Authors: Zbikowski Lawrence M.
Published: August 2017

This chapter provides an introduction to and analyses of relationships between music and dance in two dance practices from Western Europe: the first from early eighteenth-century France, the second from early nineteenth-century Vienna. The chapter introduces French dance notation and shows how it facilitates an analysis of the steps and music for a bourrée. The analysis offers insights into the musical grammar of the bourrée and the contribution that dance practice made to the construction of social relations in the court of Louis XIV. The second dance practice is that of the waltz, which had a prominent place in the social landscape of early nineteenth-century Vienna. Analyses of waltzes by Josef Lanner and Franz Schubert make clear the relationship between the music and steps of the waltz, as well as how composers adapted their music to the different social contexts within which the dance was performed.
Music and Words
Authors: Zbikowski Lawrence M.
Published: August 2017

This chapter focuses on the different ways language and music construct meaning as revealed through the medium of song. The chapter focuses on the German Lied of the early nineteenth century, and it offers analyses of three settings of Goethe’s lyric poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh.” The first is an 1814 setting by Carl Friedrich Zelter; the second was written around 1816 by Carl Loewe; the third was completed sometime before 1824 by Franz Schubert. These analyses show how each setting changes the interpretation of Goethe’s poem, demonstrating how the different grammatical resources offered by music and language shape the way meaning is constructed in these songs.
Life in a ‘No-go Area’
Authors: Kirmani Nida
Published: August 2017

This chapter by Nida Kirmani offers a rare academic study on Lyari. It historicizes Lyari’s development as a contradictory ‘no-go’ site of resistance, protest and gang warfare. This perspective is organized around two of Lyari’s most notorious protagonists, Rehman Dakait and Uzair Baloch. Drawing on narratives of fear that comprise and interweave into everyday life in Lyari, she analyzes the persistent question of the extent to which gang war constitutes politics, rather than being separate to or an obstacle to politics. Through a portrait of Rehman as a community ‘Robin Hood’ figure, Kirmani’s analysis describes a geographic mapping of the paradox of ‘military-humanitarianism’ at the level of local gang warfare. This both mirrors, and also provokes, some original insights into ways these projects are inextricably linked in national and international politics.
‘Our Rule’
Authors: Verkaaik Oskar
Published: August 2017

This chapter by Oskar Verkaaik explores a neglected comparison between Urdu-speaking Mohajir support for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and Mohajir membership in the Dawat-i-Islami proselytizing movement in the nineties. Initially Verkaaik outlines some superficial differences that mark this comparison. Whereas the MQM comprises a political party and ethnic movement, the Dawat-i-Islami condemns politics and promotes Islam as an antidote to ethnic strife. Although the two movements are partial adversaries, both depart from a singular notion of Mohajir religiosity that is rooted in the modernist condemnation of popular religion, and exacerbated by ethnic stereotyping. Unfolding motifs of physical and spiritual migration and journeys (for example, from Mecca to Medina, India to Pakistan, Pakistan and abroad), Verkaaik argues that both movements distinctly appeal to young Karachiites’ aspirations and anxieties about the future—and tap into popular religious traditions that bind and separate Mohajirs from other segments of the Pakistani population.
The Cost of Free Speech
Authors: Sethna Razeshta
Published: August 2017

This chapter by Razeshta Sethna examines her experiences as a print journalist for the Dawn Media Group, and a presenter for Geo TV and Dawn TV. Sethna reveals professional tensions between levels of editorial control and the failure of newspaper owners and editors to protect journalists, and she illuminates ways that fear works to prevent journalists from protesting against the murder of colleagues. She unravels connections between violent politics, state violence, and the media. These involve the Muttahida Qaumi Movement party (MQM), whose militants have burnt the city’s newspaper offices and threatened journalists—and the military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agencies who pressure senior editors to censor views considered too liberal, keep silence around the state’s repression of democratic freedoms and human rights, and the ‘disappearances’ of activists in Balochistan. Notwithstanding, the proliferation of Karachi’s television media since 2007 has positioned journalists at the forefront of open criticism against violence.
Theoretical framework
Authors: Huber Judith
Published: August 2017

Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the motion encoding typology as proposed by Talmy, Slobin, and others (manner- and path-conflating languages, different types of framing and their concomitant characteristics). It argues that this typology is highly compatible with a construction grammar framework, points out the differences, and shows that particularly from the diachronic perspective taken in this study, the constructionist approach has advantages over the originally lexicalist approach of the motion typology. The chapter also provides a discussion of the different categories of motion verbs used in this study (manner verbs, path verbs, neutral motion verbs, and verbs that do not evoke a motion event on their own, but can receive a contextual motion reading).
Problems with historical data
Authors: Huber Judith
Published: August 2017

Chapter 3 discusses the challenges presented by the historical data used in the study and how they are dealt with in the book: (a) the evidence, particularly for Old English, is limited and does not represent the genres and registers normally used in motion-encoding typology studies; (b) establishing the decontextualized meaning of verbs from earlier stages of a language can be problematic, including in view of the highly detailed entries in period dictionaries, which aim at listing all the contextualized meanings of a verb. Exemplary analyses illustrate how this problem is approached in the present study in comparison to previous works.
Introduction
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

This initial chapter states and develops the book’s unifying theme. Whereas the trend in recent years has been to conceptualize normative issues in terms of collectivities, relationships, and social meanings, this chapter takes as its starting point the view that individual persons are the basic moral units. It assumes, moreover, that although individuals are capable of deep and meaningful attachments, the deeper truth about them is that they are isolated creatures, permanently separated from one another by the impenetrability of their subjectivities. The first half of the chapter elaborates this form of individualism and explains how it bears on a variety of important questions in moral and political philosophy. Then, the second half provides a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book’s contents.
We’re Number One
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

When a person must choose among actions that will affect both him and other people, he generally takes the others’ interests to have some rational weight, but not as much as his own. This familiar view is intermediate between two others: first, that only the individual’s own interests give him reason to act, and, second, that everyone else’s interests count just as much as his own. Of these two polar views, each has had forceful proponents and each can be traced to a compelling starting point. By contrast, the intermediate view that actually informs most practice seems much harder to defend. The question in this paper is whether that view is simply an unprincipled compromise between two powerful but irreconcilable intellectual pressures or whether, instead, there is some positive reason to accept it
What Is Moral Standing?
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

People employ the concept of moral standing when they try to explain why (or, less frequently, deny that) all humans are of equal moral importance. They also do so when they ask whether animals, fetuses, or seriously and permanently impaired humans are of lesser status than normal humans. But what do claims about moral standing come to, and how are they related to other moral categories such as obligation, value, and rights? This chapter develops a conception of moral standing that is neutral among the competing moral theories and their competing vocabularies and concepts. The main thesis defended is that a being’s moral standing relative to a given theory depends not on how the theory’s principles say it should be treated but rather on whether claims about its interests are among the inputs to the arguments by which the theory defends its principles.
How Bad Is It to Be Dominated?
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

When A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, the discussion that ensued centered mainly on questions about distribution. More recently, however, many influential theorists have come to believe that this emphasis on distribution is neither faithful to Rawls’s thinking nor defensible on its own terms. They argue that what justice primarily demands is not that resources or welfare or opportunity be distributed in any particular way, but rather that relations of domination and subordination among persons be eliminated. In their view, what matters is not that goods be distributed equally (or in accordance with any other pattern), but only that individuals relate to one another as equals. Despite the prominence this approach to justice has achieved, the chapter argues that it is seriously mistaken.
Other Voices, Other Rooms?
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

In her influential book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan argues that women and men construe moral problems differently and that these differences have important implications for moral theory. Her discussion is built around a series of contrasts: she maintains, among other things, that women’s moral thought tends to be concrete and contextual rather than abstract, personal rather than impersonal, and oriented to care rather than duty. However, this chapter argues that these and related oppositions have always been part of the moral problematic and that their introduction sheds little new light on the theoretical options that are available to us.
Wrongdoing and Relationships
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

In recent years, a number of philosophers have sought to account for various backward-looking responses to wrongdoing by emphasizing its destructive effects on a person’s relationships. By interposing damaged relationships between the wrong acts and such responses as blame, punishment, and atonement, these philosophers have tried to gain access to new ways of justifying these responses. But how can any such account work when the wrongdoer and victim are strangers and thus have no relationship to damage? To assess the seriousness of this difficulty, the chapter considers the responses of three proponents of the relational account concluding in each case that the difficulty has not been fully met.
Global Norming
Authors: Sher George
Published: August 2017

This chapter addresses the dilemma that faculty members face when their obligation to help their students get jobs conflicts with their obligation to tell the truth about those students. To this dilemma, it can be replied either that (1) anyone who now must either violate his duty of veracity or fail to fulfill his obligation to a student must previously have created the problem by doing something he shouldn’t, or that (2) our obligations to our students never require that we distort the truth or omit important facts, or that (3) we owe our students plenty of distorting and omitting, but doing these things in letters of recommendation is not wrong. Some problems with each approach are discussed, and examples of both truthful and less than truthful letters are provided.
Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration
Authors: Waltham-Smith Naomi
Published: August 2017

In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
Haydn’s Revolution
Authors: Waltham-Smith Naomi
Published: August 2017

This chapter rigorously revises the music-theoretical conception of convention from the standpoint of Derridean deconstruction. The mediation of personal expression and generic convention is shown to be a dialectic of the proper and the improper. Analyses of a number of Haydn’s quartets illustrate that the modes of listening they produce always entail a certain exappropriation. This reading suggests one way in which Haydn is an “event,” as Badiou has claimed: the music reveals listening’s intimate relation to belonging. It does so by manipulating the relation between musical material and its use and by exposing the (im)potentiality of material before any appropriation.
Faulkner's Media Romance
Authors: Murphet Julian
Published: August 2017

This book reassesses William Faulkner’s engagement with modern media technologies and transportation systems. It argues that Faulkner’s inveterate interest in figures of flight, automobiles, radio, phonographs, photographs, and other modern techno-media was secretly motivated by a profound and ongoing aesthetic tug of war in his writing. He resolved this tension between artistic modernism and the vanished worlds of antebellum romance by a recourse to tropes borrowed from the modern media system. These tropes masked his investment in romance materials, giving it a modern overlay, and allowed him to look critically upon the persistence of superannuated romance within the modern media ecology itself. This economical and generative strategy allowed Faulkner to “eat his cake and have it” as regards those romance materials and to make entirely novel moves in the rapidly changing form of the novel between 1929 and 1936.
Modernism and the Absent Event of Romance
Authors: Murphet Julian
Published: August 2017

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the substantive analyses to follow. It foregrounds Faulkner’s profound continuing attachment to romance tropes which his more modernist aesthetic sensibilities would increasingly deem invalid. It argues that Faulkner’s primary artistic challenge was finding ways and means to “manage” his anachronistic romanticism, via technical strategies of omission, repression, and tropological masking. The chapter both considers the lingering aesthetic ideology of romance in the modern United States, especially the South, and outlines a genealogy of literary tactics Faulkner was able to employ in order to discipline it, before introducing the major new formal device for which he was responsible: masking romance with figures taken from the new media system.
Currents of Consciousness; or, my mother is a graphophone
Authors: Murphet Julian
Published: August 2017

This chapter explores the acoustical dynamics of the novels Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying (with an extended glance at Light in August) to demonstrate how intimately attuned Faulkner’s verbal art was at the turn of the decade (circa 1930) to new audio technologies, particularly the phonograph and radio. It shows how new recording, playback, and broadcasting media radically affected the literary category of “voice” in Faulkner’s novels, multiplying its sources, modifying its tense and person, and warping the very nature of its authority. The chapter asks how this subtle but irresistible infiltration of the novelistic domain of voice by new sound media might have provoked new kinds of aesthetic responsiveness at a higher, organizational level too (as regards the prevailing agon between romance and modernism), and so pulled the Faulknerian text in directions that opened it to unprecedented formal mutations.
“Would India had beene never knowne”
Authors: Bross Kristina
Published: August 2017

This chapter analyzes two representations of women based on the print record of a 1623 incident in which English traders were tortured and killed by their Dutch rivals on the island of Amboyna in the East Indies. William Sanderson imagined the reaction of one “Amboyna widow” in a pair of publications in the 1650s, and John Dryden created characters for his 1673 play Amboyna based on reports published years earlier. If we consider these works as early modern examples of historical fiction we can see that the writers construct the role of colonial women in the seventeenth-century English imagination as a symbol of the righteousness of English imperial actions and colonizing claims. Taken together, the “wives’ tales” of this chapter suggest that the reach of the East India Companies—both English and Dutch—and of their governments into people’s lives was powerful. Yet the stories of these women suggested by their traces in the archives indicate the limits of that power and the limits of the archival function to control the stories of marginalized people. Dryden’s play in particular points readers back to the archives and suggests what they tell us (or fail to tell us) about the subjects of the English global fantasies inscribed in the literature and other print records of the seventeenth century. The coda pieces together contextual and archival material to speculate on the experiences of a woman, held as a slave by the Dutch, who was intimately connected to the Amboyna incident.
Part One
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

The Dialogues begins with a discussion about the proper religious education of Pamphilus, a pupil of Cleanthes. In rejecting Cleanthes’ idea that our natural faculties of reason can provide the basis of religion, Philo, Demea, and Hume speak as one, laying out skeptical challenges. This calls for an analysis of skepticism, both rustic and urbane; an examination of Hume’s work in the Treatise and Enquiry shows him to be, like the urbane Pyrrhonist, accepting of common-life reason and experience but wary of abstruse philosophizing. In subsequent parts of the Dialogues, Cleanthes must put forward an empirically based theology. If he does so successfully, he wins; if he can make no progress in this regard, he loses.
Part Two
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

In Part 2 of the Dialogues, Cleanthes presents his proposed proof of the existence of a deity, with Philo evaluating it on its own terms, echoing passages from the Treatise and Enquiry.
Part Four
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

Philo presses arguments as if drawn from a Pyrrhonist handbook: attempts to put religious belief on a rational footing fail to do so, and even more, they undercut the very commitments they are intended to establish.
Parts Six and Seven
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

Demea, Philo, and Hume himself find that a finite deity—the best that natural theology can produce—is unsatisfactory for veneration and worship. Alternative starting places for the teleological argument are given: comparisons to an animal or a vegetable, rather than machine.
Part Eleven
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

Confronted with the problem of evil, Cleanthes retreats to a “finitely perfect” deity who is the “Author of Nature.” Philo, again echoing the Enquiry, points out that conjectures, especially where infinity is excluded, may perhaps be sufficient to prove a consistency but can never be the foundations for inference. Again, Philo sounds like Epicurus, and the Dialogues is clearly consistent with Hume’s other philosophical writings. The matter at issue in section 11 of the Enquiry and part 11 of the Dialogues is whether the existence of a providential deity can be established on empirical grounds. The a priori proof does not prove the existence of anything; the a posteriori proof cannot respond to the problem of evil.
Part Twelve
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

Part 12 is bracketed by two problematic passages: Philo expresses extravagant religious commitments, and he declares that “to be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step toward being a sound believing Christian.” The dialectical structure of the Dialogues reflects that in the Treatise and the Enquiry. Hume recognizes the strong attraction of abstruse philosophy and thus the importance of taking precautions against it. When Philo recommends a brand of philosophical skepticism, it is the mitigated skepticism in the closing of the Enquiry. His closing adoration of a divine being is not the product of reasoning at all. It is, when it occurs, irresistible—Cleanthes’ irregular argument. Cleanthes’ “cause of order in the universe” is reduced to an anemic “having some remote analogy to human intelligence.” “Who Speaks for Hume?” is answered with assurance: Cleanthes and Philo do, and sometimes even Demea.
Conclusion to Section I: Who Speaks for Hume?
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

Having reached the end of the Dialogues, we find a question naturally arising: “Who won?” The answer to this question will depend to a significant extent on the reader’s assessment of the strength or weakness of the arguments presented in the text. This leaves considerable room for disagreement, and distinguished Hume scholars have offered competing answers—most favoring Philo, some Cleanthes, but none, so far as I know, Demea....
Introduction
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

So far this work has presented an analysis of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, concentrating on its relationship to central themes in his major philosophical works. I will now widen the scope of this study and examine a number of cases where there have been significant disagreements with respect to the proper understanding of his philosophical standpoint. For example, the nature and role of skepticism in his philosophy has been a controversial topic, one that divides Hume scholars in fundamental ways. At one extreme, Norman Kemp Smith speaks of Hume’s “general policy of stating his skeptical positions with the least possible emphasis compatible with definiteness” (Kemp Smith’s edition of the ...
Richard Popkin on Hume and Pyrrhonism
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

Popkin says that Hume’s theory provides the proper mixture of dogmatism and skepticism in a manner that Popkin deems even stronger than that found in traditional Pyrrhonism. Hume does not find the Pyrrhonist method of seeking quietude—counterbalancing opposing beliefs—always under our rational control. For Hume, Popkin says, radical skepticism is a threat—protected by the inherent inability of the human mind to sustain abstruse reasoning. No threat of general skepticism, which “leads to madness,” according to Popkin, emerges as long as Philo restricts himself to empirical challenges to Cleanthes. Having Philo employ general Pyrrhonian modes—infinite regress, for example—raises the specter of general skepticism that troubled Hume in the Treatise.
David Hume on the Dialogues
Authors: Fogelin Robert J.
Published: August 2017

In the Dialogues, Hume speaks only through his characters. In an exchange of letters with Gilbert Elliot, a friend and devout church elder, Hume both asks for help in strengthening Cleanthes’ side, claiming he burned a youthful work on natural religion, and comments on the arguments in the Dialogues. This chapter comments on Hume’s remarks to Elliot, alluding to relevant passages in the Treatise and Enquiry, particularly regarding cause and effect. The chapter concludes with Hume’s words echoing those concluding the Dialogues: “There is more Satisfaction & Convenience in holding to the Catechism we have been first taught. Now this I have nothing to say against. … Such a Conduct is founded on the most universal & determn’d Scepticism, join’d to a little Indolence.”
The Reality of Consciousness
Authors: Goff Philip
Published: August 2017

This chapter presents the “big picture” approach of this book. It argues that the reality of consciousness is a datum in its own right, a starting point for metaphysical enquiry that sits alongside the data of observation and experiments. This perspective is defended against neuro-fundamentalism (the view that the only way to make progress in explaining consciousness is to do more neuroscience) and methodological naturalism (the view that we should look to—and only to—the third-person scientific method to tell us what reality is like). This partly involves attributing the success of the physical sciences to the fact that Galileo limited its domain of enquiry, by supposing that the sensory qualities are not in the physical world. Finally, the two views that are the focus of the book—physicalism and Russellian monsim—are introduced, and the main claims that will be made about them are articulated.
Analytic Phenomenology
Authors: Goff Philip
Published: August 2017

This chapter outlines a consciousness-based approach to metaphysics: analytic phenomenology. Chapter 5 argued that introspection reveals the essential nature of our conscious states. Analytic phenomenology builds on this, taking our introspective grasp of the nature of consciousness as a crucial source of data for metaphysical enquiry. This methodology is explored in relation to contemporary debates on composition, and a phenomenological argument for presentism is outlined to give an example of how analytic phenomenology might be applied outside of the mind–body problem. The datum of consciousness is hugely neglected in contemporary philosophy; proper appreciation of it has the potential to revolutionize metaphysics in the analytic tradition.
Pluralism and Power
Authors: Fletcher Jeannine Hill
Published: August 2017

When teaching about religious diversity, instructors need to recognize the power they have in shaping what “counts” as religion and religious experience. The basis of this chapter is a literature review of world religion textbooks through which instructors might introduce religious diversity to their students. Through a critical lens of gender inclusion, this essay finds a continued androcentrism in these texts, so that while women are often included as topics of discussion, the field continues to prioritize male experience as “normative.” The chapter also explores the social and political repercussions of marginalizing women and others in our scholarly field and argues that scholars of religion bear a responsibility for how these constructions impact rights and well-being in our public square.
Masao Abe and Comparative Theology
Authors: Lefebure Leo D.
Published: August 2017

A leading form of comparative theology entails commitment to one religious tradition but ventures out to encounter another tradition, with the goal of generating fresh insights into familiar beliefs and practices reliant upon both the tradition of origin and the newly encountered faith tradition. This chapter, based on a graduate course at Georgetown University, examines how Zen Buddhist thinker Masao Abe engages in a dialogue with Western philosophy and Christian theology. Abe interpreted the meaning of the kenosis (emptying) of God in Jesus Christ in Christian theology in light of Mahayana Buddhist perspectives on Sunyata (emptying) and the logic of negation. The chapter includes responses to Abe from various Christian theologians, including Georgetown graduate students.
Challenges in Teaching Islamic Studies in Western Universities
Authors: Panjwani Imranali
Published: August 2017

When teaching Islam to undergraduates, the question of pedagogy is crucial. Modules must be designed to capture the breadth of the religion, including ethics, spirituality, worldview, role of holy figures, history, scientific disciplines, cultural formations, and contemporary developments. Although Western universities should be commended for introducing Islamic Studies to undergraduates, they streamline Islam to the extent that it is reduced to Islamic history. This means Islam’s intellectual tradition is seen as a contribution of the past rather than a living contribution for current human problems. In this chapter, I will share the challenges I faced as a tutor in Islamic Studies at King’s College London within the context of two pedagogical issues: (1) how Islamic Studies modules could be designed more effectively and (2) how effective learning environments can be created for undergraduate students of Islamic Studies.
Teaching Exodus Interreligiously
Authors: Maoz Daniel , Jorgenson Allen
Published: August 2017

What follows is an exploration of an ongoing project by the coauthors of this chapter. We are in our third year of coteaching a course in Bible/theology for Waterloo Lutheran Seminary at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada). In the past we have cotaught Psalms and Romans, with Daniel and Allen bringing, respectively, Jewish and (Lutheran) Christian insights to the task of reading these texts. The present chapter attends to the earlier experiences and draws heavily upon our most recent experience, which involved teaching Exodus together. We explore the insights gained by each of us in these rich experiences of teaching interreligiously.
Introducing the Bhagavad Gītā as Theological Source Text
Authors: Edelmann Jonathan
Published: August 2017

The goal of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the context, the key terms, and some essential verses in the Bhagavad Gītā (BhG), a text that is indispensable to understanding the Hindu traditions of theology and culture, as well as Indian civilization more broadly. The BhG is used widely in core text programs, in introductions to world religion, and with increasing frequency in courses on comparative theology, with the goal to widen the understanding of students of religion and theology in a global context. The BhG can also be discussed as influential on modern American and European thought since it inspired people as diverse as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Wachowski Brothers.
The Case Study Method as a Means of Teaching about Pluralism
Authors: Randall Brendan W. , Barth Whittney
Published: August 2017

In her course on religious diversity in the United States, Dr. Diana Eck of Harvard University introduces students to a range of religious traditions, especially those associated with more recent waves of immigration. Using case studies as the organizational pedagogy, Eck urges students to consider a particular response to increased religious diversity, namely pluralism as a civic value. We explore whether Eck’s use of the case study method provides mechanisms by which the “encounter of commitments” (a key concept in Eck’s definition of pluralism) could occur among students and thereby promote a pluralistic disposition. Although we found evidence of such encounters, their pedagogical impact may have been undermined by the lack of a precise understanding of civic pluralism and a reluctance among some students to share their views.
A Contextual Model for Interreligious Learning
Authors: Farina Marianne , McChesney Robert W.
Published: August 2017

The Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University (Berkeley) features an interreligious immersion program that offers students unique opportunities to study a religious tradition other than their own in local settings. The program focuses on the sacred teachings and historical developments of a tradition, along with comparative spiritual practices and experiences of religious communities. Recent destinations include India, Indonesia, the Middle East, and Nepal. Central to program goals is the conviction that the experience is formative. Students develop a deeper understanding of religious traditions, interreligious dialogue, and the importance of understanding the complex realities of these traditions in actual settings. All of these spheres of learning impact the students’ studies and ministry training.
Performing Queer Modernism
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: August 2017

Focusing on some of the best-known stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, while also suggesting that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance, Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and Djuna Barnes’s metatheatrical parodies To the Dogs and The Dove explore manifestations, facets, and dimensions of and suggest ways of reading—and of viewing earlier “readers” reading—queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist and how their coproductive intersection was articulated in and through performance. The book contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relationship between performance history and the history of sexuality. In doing so, it adds to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain underrepresented. It also contributes to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative and more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.
“[W]‌ithout the assistance of any girls”
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: August 2017

This chapter focuses on Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun (1912) to consider how modernist performance could queer sex without representing same-sex relations and in the process become a focal point for sexually dissident spectatorship. In the ballet, the Faun bypasses a group of nymphs in favor of a solitary sexual experience. In doing so, he thwarts narrative expectations, foregrounding an autonomous male sexuality that was thrown into relief by the two-dimensionality of Nijinsky’s choreography. This relationship between modernist form and queer content produced a representation of male sexuality that was neither conventionally masculine nor effeminate. Afternoon of a Faun’s significance as a key work of queer modernism is underscored by its role in the historical emergence of an identifiably gay and lesbian audience, as well as by the mythologization of Nijinsky as the Faun as both an enabling and cautionary figure of queer sexuality.
“What are you trying to say?”— “I’m saying it”
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: August 2017

This chapter considers Djuna Barnes’s 1923 metatheatrical parodies To the Dogs and The Dove to suggest that the audience for queer modernist performance was not limited to past spectators but has also encompassed later critics and theorists, and that the work’s impact has extended beyond its original context into the present moment, shaping critical discourse in modernist studies. Barnes’s plays have been regarded by some as dramatic failures, but in fact they deliberately thwart conventional representational tropes and dynamics to stage critiques of gendered and sexualized narrative structures and scopic economies. Reprinted in key anthologies of modernist literature, the plays have become research and teaching resources that have contributed to the development of feminist and queer modernist studies. As such, they have “performed” even though they remain mostly unperformed, exemplifying the performativity of queer modernist theatre not only in its original historical context but also across time.
Paternalism and Public Health
Authors: Flanigan Jessica
Published: August 2017

Since medical paternalism is wrong in the clinical context, it should be rejected in public policy as well. But even if paternalistic public health policies were permissible, it is not clear that prohibitive pharmaceutical regulations are necessary to promote public health. Prohibitions could undermine health in some cases, for example, if prescription requirements make patients more deferential to physicians and tolerant of medical risks. Premarket testing requirements cause people to suffer and die waiting for new drugs to get approved, and they discourage new drug development. This is not to say that regulation serves no purpose. Pharmaceutical regulators provide a valuable pubic good by overseeing testing for new drugs and by certifying drugs that they deem generally safe and effective. But the benefits of regulation do not require that the regulations be prohibitive, and prohibitive regulations not only violate patients’ rights, they may also cost lives.
Responsibility and Regulation
Authors: Flanigan Jessica
Published: August 2017

The case against approval requirements is even stronger than the empirical record suggests. When patients die because they knowingly and willingly used a dangerous pharmaceutical, drug manufacturers are not culpable for patients’ deaths because patients consent to the risks associated with dangerous drugs. Yet when patients die because they were prohibited from accessing a drug, those who stand in their way are morally responsible for their deaths. This argument appeals to a moral distinction between killing and letting die, which marks out particular policies, those that kill people rather than allowing some to die, as especially unjust. If we accept the distinction between killing and letting die, we ought to conclude that public officials kill people by enforcing prescription requirements. This thesis lends further support to rights of self-medication, especially the right to try.
The Politics of Self-Medication
Authors: Flanigan Jessica
Published: August 2017

Patients can advocate for rights of self-medication in several ways. First, patients should be included in the process of drug development and should not be prohibited from developing and testing treatments on their own or privately funding medical research. Second, patients can use social media to advocate for access to new drugs and drug approval. Third, patients have a moral right to engage in civil disobedience and to illegally access and distribute pharmaceuticals. Fourth, citizens should support large-scale patient activism, such as the ACT UP and right to try movement. Fifth, officials should advocate for political reforms to protect patients’ rights of self-medication, even if such reforms lack democratic support.
Abdullah Quilliam
Authors: Seddon Mohammad Siddique
Published: August 2017

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.
Abdullah Quilliam and the Rise of International Esoteric-Masonic Islamophilia
Authors: Bowen Patrick D.
Published: August 2017

This chapter argues that Abdullah Quilliam’s Masonic and esoteric background shaped both his understanding of Islam and his leadership of the Liverpool Muslim community. From the time of his conversion through the last trace of his activities in England using the Quilliam name, the connection between Islam, Freemasonry, and esotericism played a significant role in Quilliam’s religious career. In addition to exploring the roles of Freemasonry and esotericism within Quilliam’s own life and activities, this chapter also looks at the larger context of the mixing of Islam, Freemasonry, and esotericism in the Euro-American world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter argues, in fact, that Quilliam played a role in the development of a broader, Euro-American cultural current in which esotericists and esoteric-leaning Masons came to place a high value on Islam. In the twentieth century, this current not only influenced Islamophilia within numerous non-Islamic esoteric organizations, it also produced a variety of Islam-based movements with strong elements of both esotericism and Freemasonry.
‘Fairer to the Ladies’ and of Benefit to the Nation
Authors: Robinson-Dunn Diane
Published: August 2017

By examining his writings, speeches, poetry and actions, as well as those of his contemporaries involved with the Liverpool Muslim community, this chapter explores Abdullah Quilliam’s relationship with gender roles and constructs. It considers his creative self-fashioning, for which he drew from both "Eastern" and "Western" influences in order to present a version of British Muslim masculinity characterized by sensitivity, chivalry, reverence for motherhood, and the pursuit of social justice. Quilliam believed that the limited polygamy, or more accurately polygyny, as sanctioned by the Qur’an, which he, in fact, practiced, not only benefited individuals and family life, but also strengthened nation and empire by encouraging population growth and thereby preventing degeneration and decay. In addition, Quilliam’s belief in the benefits of racial and cultural “miscegenation” became an issue of no small importance during a time when his critics and even officials in the British Home and Foreign Offices expressed concern that his willingness to perform “mixed marriages” posed a threat to national security.