bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Beautiful Uselessness
Authors: Whitesell Lloyd
Published: October 2018

This chapter explores special cases where glamour conventions demonstrate aestheticist values, that is, the exaltation of style for its own sake. At such times, the aesthetic intensity of glamour seems to offer an escape to a world of pure artifice, beauty, and style. The discussion identifies the central values of aestheticism as expressed in the high-art milieu and illustrates the same values at work in glamorous numbers. To analyze ultrastylishness in musical arrangement, it considers finesse on a small scale (e.g., contrapuntal ornamentation, textural and harmonic ingenuity) before turning to ingenuity of overall design in numbers such as “Dancing in the Dark,” from the film The Band Wagon, and “This Heart of Mine,” from Ziegfeld Follies.
Stardust
Authors: Whitesell Lloyd
Published: October 2018

This chapter considers the deep-rooted association of glamour with magic powers. Glamour’s bestowal of mystique on objects, people, and emotions depends on a more fundamental goal of inspiring magical thinking, an aspect of glamour that seeks to preserve the experience of enchantment in a disenchanted world. The Hollywood phenomena of star worship and iconic representation are discussed as secular religious practices that have developed in response to the changing conditions of modernity. The chapter shows how three conventional symbols of divinity—haloes, crowns, and veils—contribute to the idolization of a star and find expression in film music according to its own sonic vocabulary.
Tricks of the Light
Authors: Whitesell Lloyd
Published: October 2018

This chapter turns to the other side of the coin—the failure of magical belief. Glamour conjures up a transfigured counter-reality and acts as a bridge to that imagined existence. But the entire symbolic edifice is built on fancy and prone to collapse, with reality reasserting itself and dragging us back from our projection into the dreamworld. Many film musicals warn against glamour as mystification or deceit. Four types of examples are discussed, each skeptical in a different way (joking, haunted, wishful, manipulative). Concluding discussion shows how the musical genre has affinities with the hybrid aesthetic of “magical realism.” The incorporation of a realistic dimension into the discourse of musical fantasy preserves an external vantage point for critical reflection—a demystifying impulse in tension with glamour’s mystique.
Tolstoy’s Embodied Reader
Authors: Auyoung Elaine
Published: October 2018

This chapter considers a major representational strategy that Leo Tolstoy uses throughout Anna Karenina. By repeatedly focusing on his characters’ performance of routine physical actions, Tolstoy cues readers to draw on the motor memory they have acquired from their own embodied experience. Not only does this technique enable readers to grasp the fictional world with exceptional sensory and affective immediacy, but the ease or fluency with which readers retrieve their background knowledge can also heighten their sense of the fictional world’s familiarity and intimacy. Tolstoy’s handling of novelistic detail demonstrates how literary realism transforms ordinary experiences into a source of aesthetic pleasure.
When Novels End
Authors: Auyoung Elaine
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines why readers, writers, and literary critics sometimes use the vocabulary of loss and mourning to describe the experience of coming to the end of a novel. It relies on the elegies of Thomas Hardy to understand the phenomenology of returning to one’s immediate surroundings after being immersed in a fictional world and of having to detach from fictional persons who continue to dwell in one’s mind. Hardy’s imaginative fascination with one-sided, parasocial relationships that are never reciprocated also reveals that attending to literary characters permits readers to experience forms of negative and positive liberty that are unavailable in real life.
Conclusion
Authors: Franks Hallie M.
Published: October 2018

Drawing in particular from Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space and its production—according to which space is conceived as a network of relations between perceived, conceived, and lived experiences—the conclusion situates the arguments of the previous chapters in relationship to the function of the symposium as a social practice. The mosaics, by actively participating in the construction of spatial metaphors, played a crucial role in facilitating the intellectual transformation central to the symposium experience and in creating and solidifying social bonds among the participants. These conclusions suggest that the andron served as a social space in more complex ways than previously understood.
Knowledge and Belief Through the Mirror of Japanese
Authors: Iida Takashi
Published: October 2018

The author considers three Japanese verbs that may be the counterparts of the English “know” and “believe.” As verbs of thinking, they typically form mental predicates, which are sensitive to the difference in grammatical person in Japanese. He also shows how difference in person is connected to aspectual properties of these verbs. Some Japanese verbs for mental activities may take two sentential complements, one for their objects and the other for their contents. It is argued that the verb shiru, a counterpart of “know,” is one such two-complement verb. It is suggested that the object complement of shiru must be a definite noun phrase, and it is the source of the factivity of shiru. The two-complement structure of shiru and other Japanese verbs suggests that a mental activity may have its own object, as well as its content, and it is important to consider their relation to each other.
Multiple Chinese Verbs Equivalent to the English Verb “Know”
Authors: Arakawa Kiyohide , Mizumoto Masaharu
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines the basic grammatical and semantic features of knowledge verbs in Chinese—renshi, zhidao, and liaojie—and compares them with their counterparts in English and Japanese. The comparison is mainly based on lexical aspects like being stative or nonstative, whether they express in their basic forms a state, or an event, and so on. The authors then examine whether these verbs allow uses in orders, combine with some auxiliary verbs like the counterparts of “decide to,” “want to,” and the like (which suggest the possibility or the degree of voluntary control). Finally, they propose a possible “order of activity implication” among zhidao, “know,” and two Japanese knowledge verbs.
The Contribution of Confucius to Virtue Epistemology
Authors: Ryan Shane , Mi Chienkuo
Published: October 2018

Scholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This chapter seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The third goal is to show that Confucian thought is not only of epistemological significance, but that it can make a contribution to progressing contemporary epistemology.
Gettier Was Framed!
Authors: Machery Edouard , Stich Stephen , Rose David , Chatterjee Amita , Karasawa Kaori , Struchiner Noel , Sirker Smita , Usui Naoki , Hashimoto Takaaki
Published: October 2018

Gettier cases describe situations where an agent possesses a justified true belief that p, without, at least according to mainstream analytic epistemology, knowing that p, while the “Gettier intuition” is the judgment that a protagonist in a Gettier case does not know the relevant proposition. Our goal in this chapter is to show that we can make the Gettier intuition compelling or underwhelming by presenting it in different contexts. We report a surprising order effect whereby people find the Gettier intuition less compelling when a case describing a justified but false belief is presented before a Gettier case. We also report a surprising framing effect: two Gettier cases that differ only in their philosophically irrelevant narrative details elicit substantially different judgments. Finally, we discuss the metaphilosophical implications of these effects.
I Know
Authors: Wierzbicka Anna
Published: October 2018

This chapter argues that a philosophical account of human epistemology needs to be complemented by a linguistic one, informed by analytical and empirical experience of cross-linguistic semantics. The author outlines such a complementary account, based on many decades of empirical and analytical research undertaken within the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach. The main conclusion is that KNOW is an indefinable and universal human concept, and that there are four “canonical” frames in which this concept occurs across languages, the most basic one being the “dialogical” frame: “I know,” “I don’t know.” The author contends that both the questions and the answers concerning the “epistemology for the rest of the world” need to be anchored in some conceptual givens, derived neither from historically shaped Anglo English, nor from the European philosophical tradition, but from a more reliable, language- and culture-independent source; and the author shows how this can be done.
Theory of Knowledge without (Comparative) Linguistics
Authors: Hazlett Allan
Published: October 2018

What is the relationship between the theory of knowledge and linguistics? Consider a familiar epistemological methodology, on which facts about how “knows” is ordinarily used provide evidence for and against particular views about the nature and scope of knowledge. Since “knows” is a word in English, which is one of many human languages, this methodology is problematic, akin to a species of cultural chauvinism. I suggest that we should reject the familiar linguistics-driven methodology, in favor of a picture on which theorizing about knowledge is driven by the stipulation of the value of knowledge, and is not beholden to linguistic intuitions.
On How to Defend or Disprove the Universality Thesis
Authors: Tsai Cheng-hung , Lien Chinfa
Published: October 2018

According to the universality thesis, the epistemic properties referred to by the English epistemic verb “know” contained in the expressions of the form “S knows that p” or “S knows how to φ‎” are shared by the translations of the epistemic verb in all other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and so on. Some doubt that there is reason to think the universality thesis is true because little or nothing is shown about the meanings and uses of the epistemic terms in languages other than English. Critics of the universality thesis find counterevidence to the thesis; that is, the evidence demonstrates that translations of the epistemic verb “know” are used differently in some languages from the way “know” is used in English. In this chapter, the authors examine the effectiveness of such counterevidence.
Primate Social Cognition and the Core Human Knowledge Concept
Authors: Turri John
Published: October 2018

The author reviews recent work from armchair and cross-cultural epistemology on whether humans possess a knowledge concept as part of a universal “folk epistemology.” The work from armchair epistemology fails because it mischaracterizes ordinary knowledge judgments. The work from cross-cultural epistemology provides some defeasible evidence for a universal folk epistemology. He argues that recent findings from comparative psychology establish that humans possess a species-typical knowledge concept. More specifically, recent work shows that knowledge attributions are a central part of primate social cognition, used to predict others’ behavior and guide decision-making. The core primate knowledge concept is that of truth detection (across different sensory modalities) and retention (through memory), and may also include rudimentary forms of indirect truth discovery through inference. In virtue of their evolutionary heritage, humans inherited the primate social-cognitive system and thus share this core knowledge concept.
Self-Reflexive Hollywood
Authors: Cohan Steven
Published: October 2018

This chapter surveys the various self-reflexive tropes with which the backstudio picture authenticates its view of filmmaking and Hollywood by referring to its own existence as a backstudio. Films mentioned briefly or discussed for a page or more range from throughout the history of the genre. The chapter covers many types of examples, such as quotation of the industry’s own discourse, press books and trailers, films within films or inserted clips, cameos, inclusion of real Hollywood people interacting with fictional characters, and DVD supplements. The chapter concludes with two case studies of sustained self-reflexivity: Singin’ in the Rain and Tropic Thunder.
Imaginary Hollywood
Authors: Cohan Steven
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines the back-and-forth shifts in how backstudios have imagined Hollywood as the glamorous site of film production. It first looks at how Hollywood is imagined in early backstudios as a specific locale on or near Hollywood Boulevard and accessible by motor car or bus. This view gets complicated by Hollywood’s also being exemplified by the bounded studio compound, with its restrictiveness and regulation, personified by the guard at the front gate. Finally, by the 1940s, when a studio setting becomes synonymous with Hollywood regardless of its location in the Los Angeles area, Hollywood is rendered as a state of mind. It provides a principle of inclusion and exclusion, its mystique and industrial infrastructure protecting those within its orbit and, at the same time, exposing the marginality and vulnerability of those kept out. The multiple examples cited here range from Show People (1928) through La La Land (2016).
Virtual Hollywood
Authors: Cohan Steven
Published: October 2018

This chapter looks at two rather recent ways that backstudios have moved the virtual world of moviemaking off the screen. “Immersive Hollywood” occurs when fictional characters interact with real-life actors or spectators. As this occurs in the story, they cross the boundary separating the reel from the real as epitomized by the screen, raising questions about the value of Hollywood escapism. By comparison, “appropriated Hollywood” happens when a state apparatus—the police, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the White House—fabricates a film production as its cover story for a covert sting operation. Here the analogy of Hollywood and the actions of corrupt or unethical (or at least highly secret) state agents draws out the unsettling equivalence of the film industry’s practices of simulation and those of the national security state.
Conclusion
Authors: Cohan Steven
Published: October 2018

The backstudio picture is a long-lived genre. Its value, I have argued, arises from its function in defining what Hollywood signifies as a place, an industry, and a fantasy. For some filmmakers, a backstudio story has no doubt offered them a venue for settling scores or exploring cinematic creativity. But I have for the most part discounted the personal intentions of individuals throughout this book and instead have focused on the backstudio picture as a product turned out with great regularity from the silent era to the present day. The genre’s importance exceeds the commercial success or failure of individual backstudios at the box office, moreover, since it has been a cumulative phenomenon, the effect of numerous backstudios coming out in a single year time and time again. Viewed as a robust genre, the backstudio picture has worked to keep visible the centrality of Hollywood to American filmmaking....
Introduction
Authors: Patterson Stephen J.
Published: October 2018

The Introduction sets the book in the context of a world, and a contemporary church, that readily embraces distinctions based on race, class, and gender. It introduces Galatians 3:26–28 as a remarkable strike against racism, classism, and sexism and promises to reveal that it is based upon an ancient Christian baptismal creed that goes back to the very beginning of the Jesus movement.
The Fight Against Doubt
Authors: de Melo-Martín Inmaculada , Intemann Kristen
Published: October 2018

Current debates about climate change or vaccine safety provide an alarming illustration of the potential impacts of dissent about scientific claims. False beliefs about evidence and the conclusions that can be drawn from it are commonplace, as is corrosive doubt about the existence of widespread scientific consensus. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, ill-founded dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to oppose important policies firmly rooted in science. To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed, and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. The Fight against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding is needed of the context in which science operates so as to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it in the pursuit of their goals.
Dissent and Its Discontents
Authors: de Melo-Martín Inmaculada , Intemann Kristen
Published: October 2018

This introductory chapter presents the philosophical approach used in this book to deal with the problematic epistemic and social consequences of some scientific dissent. It challenges approaches to this problem that focus on finding criteria to identify what the authors have termed normatively inappropriate dissent (NID), and it calls for a reframing of the problem that highlights some of the epistemic and social conditions actually contributing to making NID more damaging: scientific institutions and practices that undermine warranted public trust in science and a misunderstanding of the role of science in policy making. It also offers an overview of the book and specifically describes each of the chapters.
Imposing Unfair Risks
Authors: de Melo-Martín Inmaculada , Intemann Kristen
Published: October 2018

This chapters evaluates whether inductive risks judgments can serve as a reliable criterion to identify normatively inappropriate dissent (NID). Dissent that calls for rejecting certain consensus views related to public policy can be risky. When consensus views are mistakenly rejected, it can have serious consequences for public health and well-being. These risks may not be worth taking when the risks disproportionately fall on the public, or when the dissent in question fails to conform to widely shared standards of good science. It concludes that this account also fails to offer a criterion to reliably identify NID. In part this is because of the difficulties presented by the criterion of shared standards in science. Also, the ambiguities present in judgments about inductive risks lead to serious problems in practice.
Dealing with Normatively Inappropriate Dissent
Authors: de Melo-Martín Inmaculada , Intemann Kristen
Published: October 2018

This chapter considers whether the reliable identification of normatively inappropriate dissent (NID) would be helpful in addressing many of the adverse epistemic and social impacts that can result from it. It considers a variety of ways in which such identification could be used to minimize the epistemic and social damages that NID can inflict, including prohibiting the dissent in question, targeting it for special scrutiny, placing limits on scientists’ epistemic obligations, guiding public beliefs, emphasizing the existence of a consensus, and discrediting dissenters. It shows that although some of these strategies could be useful, others are unhelpful in limiting the negative impacts of NID, and may even exacerbate them or generate other equally serious problems.
Where Disagreements Can Lie
Authors: de Melo-Martín Inmaculada , Intemann Kristen
Published: October 2018

Chapter 10 proposes a second recommendation to deal with the negative adverse effects that normatively inappropriate dissent (NID) can have: it calls for a recognition of the limits of scientific evidence when it comes to public policymaking and for an increased focus on potential differences in the values that underlie policy decisions. It contends that while confusion and doubt about the existing empirical evidence or about its strength can contribute to stalled policies, disagreements about values can also play a significant role. Such disagreements can involve what people take to be valuable, how to interpret shared values, how to weigh conflicting values, and what policies are better for promoting certain valuable goals.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Authors: Hollingworth Miles
Published: October 2018

This reflexive book on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and thought challenges the meaning and form of biography and subject as much as it launches radical new treatments of Wittgenstein’s sexuality and religious thinking. From first to last, Wittgenstein’s philosophy sought to demonstrate that certainty is a function of the method it employs, rather than a knowledge of the existence or nonexistence of its objects. A devastating insight that appears to make the natural and the supernatural into equally useless examples of each other. This biography proceeds in the same way. Scattered in every direction by this challenge to meaning, it attempts to retrieve itself around the spirit of the man who could say such things. This act of recovery thus performs what could not otherwise be explained; which is something like Wittgenstein’s private conversation with God. This conversation is then allowed to talk back to the story that might have been told, to remonstrate with its facts, and finally, to show them to have been all along what Wittgenstein meant by ‘the despotic moment’, or ‘the hardness of the logical must’.
Biography versus Genius
Authors: Hollingworth Miles
Published: October 2018

The bluff has always been that Western philosophy is a life skill and a life choice, unresolved in its ultimate questions and cheerfully echoing with the laughter of the Thracian woman. And this bluff is always called when Western philosophy touches some exposed wire of Science. When it short circuits, sparks, and spasms on the possibility of a final climactic certainty. In these rare moments, history ceases to be the backdrop and setting of human life and becomes instead the active force and mastermind whom it would be futile to resist. In this chapter, we learn to call the dream of this climactic certainty ‘mental intelligence’, and its opposite ‘physical intelligence’.
Celebrate and Integrate for Continuity
Authors: Schrag Brian , Buren Kathleen J. Van
Published: October 2018

Step 7 is the final step in the Make Arts process. It includes suggestions for promoting continual creativity within communities and for celebrating both new and older arts forms. It describes results-based management (RBM) and demonstrates how to create arts-related results chains. The focus, however, is not so much in providing a new set of activities, but in urging readers to continue applying all seven of the Make Arts steps. Embedding the Make Arts cycle in community life will result in the best chance for better lives to continue to emerge and endure. This section also includes a case study and discussion highlighting the potentially devastating effects of cultural and musical change within communities. Step 7 concludes with final thoughts from the authors about the Guide and the impact they hope it will have on arts advocates and arts work.
Tongues of Fire
Authors: Farriss Nancy
Published: October 2018

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.
Continuity and Convergence
Authors: Farriss Nancy
Published: October 2018

Continuities in written doctrinal language contrast with semantic shifts within the indigenous speech community, revealed through petitions, testaments, trial testimony, and other records, as well as modern oral evidence. As the Mesoamerican cultural matrix has itself been modified by Christian practice and visual symbols, new associations have become attached to traditional linguistic resources. At the same time the Indians have reformulated and reinterpreted the Christian message along lines consonant with traditional cosmology and moral theology. Thus cultural gaps, and along with them linguistic gaps, have narrowed through the process of religious syncretism. Mutually reinforcing influences have converged in the creation of the particular variety of religious devotion defined as Mexican Christianity.
The Realness of Things Past
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

The book proposes a new paradigm of historical practice. It questions the way we conventionally historicize the experiences of non-modern peoples, western and non-western, and makes a case for an alternative. It shows how our standard analytical devices impose modern, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-modern realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process. The net result is a practice that homogenizes the past’s many different ways of being human. To produce histories that are more ethically defensible, more philosophically robust, and more historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. We need to cultivate a non-dualist historicism that will allow us to analyse each past reality on its own ontological terms, as a more or less autonomous world unto itself. The work is divided into three parts. To highlight the limitations of conventional historicist analysis and the need for an alternative, Part One (chapters 1-5) critically scrutinizes our standard modern accounts of the politeia (“way of life”) of classical Athens, the book’s primary case study. Part Two (chapters 6-9) draws on a wide range of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical literatures to frame ethical and philosophical mandates for the proposed ontological turn. To illustrate the historical benefits of this alternative paradigm, Part Three (chapters 10-16) then shows how it allows us to produce an entirely new and more meaningful account of the Athenian politeia. The book is expressly written to be accessible to a non-specialist, cross-disciplinary readership.
A World of Contradictions
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

Even when taken on its own terms, our “democratic Athens” is riddled with improbable tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions. Most obviously, it requires us to believe that a proto-modern, egalitarian “democracy” could somehow co-exist with the manifestly undemocratic treatment of female Athenians, with flagrant inequalities of wealth between male Athenians, and with the mass exploitation of tens of thousands of slaves and imperial subjects. In other words, it requires us to believe that political experience was demonstrably and continually at odds with experience in most if not all other societal “fields.” Apparently, the alleged “democratic” essence of Athenian social being was continually confounded by life in all the households, the workplaces, and the subjugated poleis which materially sustained that same social being. Moreover, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Athenians themselves were even aware of all these fundmental paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions in their midst.
Historicism and Its Consequences
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

Moreover, standard histories of Athens are riddled with the same kinds of problems that postcolonial critics have seen in the mainstream “histories” of non-western lifeworlds. To support this claim, the chapter considers three especially influential accounts of the formation of the Athenian politeia. In all three cases, this process is quite explicitly historicized as a story of modern-style “democratization,” as a progressive extension of a political or civic equality to every (male) Athenian, even though this account is quite strenuously resisted by all of our ancient sources. More generally, much as the postcolonial critique of historicism would lead us to expect, when we historicize demokratia as “democracy,” we inevitably end up figuring Athens as an incomplete or imperfect anticipation of a modern lifeworld, never as a fully realized version of itself.
Beyond Cultural History
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

Part One concludes by suggesting that the ultimate source of all these analytical problems is our standard modern template of social being. And the ultimate problem with this historicist model is that it imposes modern, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-modern realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process. The net result is a practice that homogenizes the past’s many different ways of being human by translating them all into the same peculiarly modern terms. Moreover, there is no obvious alternative practice available. Even the more theoretically informed forms of current historical practice, like mainstream cultural history, discursive history, and the “new materialist history,” likewise oblige us to re-engineer realities at the ontological level, since they too remain committed to a peculiarly modern metaphysical dualism. To produce histories that are more ethically defensible, more philosophically robust, and more historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. As a number of influential anthropologists have recently proposed, we need to employ a more “recursive” mode of analysis, one that can make sense of each non-modern world on its own ontological terms, in its own original metaphysical conjuncture, as a more or less autonomous world unto itself. In Parts Two and Three, the book will consolidate the anthropologists’ case for this move in a number of ways.
Ethnographies of the Present
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

The book then presents its philosophical case for an ontological turn. It begins by directly questioning the modern philiosophical orthodoxies which sustain conventional historical practice. Enlisting the help of numerous prominent authorities in a wide array of fields, from posthumanist studies to quantum physics, it directly challenges modernity’s dualist metaphysical and ontological certainties from a variety of different critical perspectives. Then drawing together ideas from some of the most influential of these “ethnographers of the present,” it goes on to propose an alternative, non-dualist metaphysics, a “meta-metaphysics” that would authorize us to to take an ontological turn in our practice, whereby we can historicize each past way of life on its own terms, in its own distinct world of experience.
Ontological History
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

Part Two duly concludes by spelling out in more detail what this paradigm shift to a non-dualist historicism would involve in actual practice. Essentially, it requires a distinctly recursive mode of analysis, whereby our historical subjects themselves determine the particular terms upon which their world is to be studied. This mode of analysis would begin by trying to establish the local model of social being upon which a given people’ s way of life was premised. This effectively means recovering their particular prevailing metaphysical and ontological certainties, their dominant shared account of what was and could be always already there in their world. The various practices and mechanisms of their way of life can then be analysed according to this same local model of social being. The chapter ends by answering a range of possible questions that readers may have about the proposed paradigm shift, clarifying further its nature, its theoretical parameters, and its analytical purposes.
Governed by Gods
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

In this new account of Athenian demokratia, the most significant human activities in the polis were not political deliberations or economic transactions but ritual engagements with gods, the non-human agencies who ultimately controlled the very conditions of existence. To a point, offerings to gods were like taxes rendered to maintain the infrastructure of the cosmos. Ritual actions were thus performed more or less continually, at a wide range of locations, from household shrines to major sanctuaries, by all inhabitants of Attica, male and female, young and old, Athenian and non-Athenian alike. As the chapter stresses, these actions are best understood as ecological transactions, rather than as purely “religious” practices. Indeed, in such circumstances, where gods were potentially everywhere and anywhere in experience, the modern category “religion” has little or no valence or meaning. The chapter also highlights the ritual contributions to the life of the polis that were made by females, who played literally vital ecological roles through their involvements in numerous divine cults.
The Cells of the Social Body
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

Within their cosmic ecology, the Athenians took it for granted that their polis was a “communion” (koinonia) of households, so in their experience there could be no equivalents of our modern distinctions between state and society or political and social realms. Households (oikoi) functioned as the cells of the social body, such that the vitality of the parts was inseparable from the vitality of the whole. Thus, the human “government” of the polis began not with assembly meetings but with the management of its constituent oikoi, which were the primary means of life and livelihood for all Athenians. The Athenians also took it for granted that the gods had deliberately designed males and females to play different, but complementary roles in the reproduction of social being. Women were expected to serve as “partners” to their husbands in the business of household management, performing a wide range of functions that were essential to the lives of their oikoi and therefore to the life of their polis. While they may not look like “citizens” to us, they were considered full members of the polis (politides) at the time. Terms like “patriarchy” and “misogyny,” so common in the modern literature, are accordingly unhelpful when describing gender relations in classical Athens.
Living as One Liked
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

As Michel Foucault and his followers have amply demonstrated, modern liberal “government” in the broadest sense has ultimately been about producing a historically novel kind of subject, one who is equipped in body and mind to flourish as an individual in a modern capitalist environment and thereby contribute to the net well-being of all. In Athens, by contrast, it was taken for granted that subjects were already fully equipped to govern themselves. Thus, it was simply assumed that members of different households would not only secure their own domestic well-being but also collaborate with others more or less spontaneously to perform many other essential life-sustaining functions for the polis as a whole, whether acting as constituents of formal corporations, like demes and phratries, or simpy co-operating with one another as friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow-Athenians. Hence, innumerable ecologically critical ritual actions were performed by descent-based corporations like gene, orgeones, demes, and phratries. Likewise, the vital responsibility of determining whether or not 18-year-old males were to be full members of the polis was assumed primarily by demes and phratries. No less important, the primary responsibility for determining whether or not marriages in Attica were legitimate was essentially left to friends, relatives, and neighbors. And most if not all “police” functions were performed by “civilians,” male and female, acting in concert and guided by established laws and customs.
The Cares of a Corporate Self
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

Here, finally, the book turns to consider what is more conventionally called Athenian “government,” namely the activities of Demos, the council of 500, and the sundry poliadic “officials.” As the chapter stresses, Demos, the ultimate rule-making agency in Attica, was fundamentally different from a modern “state” in at least three ways. The first of these differences concerns their respective quiddities as social objects. Whereas a modern state is conventionally seen as a machine-like material assemblage of practices and individual persons, Demos was a kind of deathless corporate person in its own right, one that both pre-existed and outlived the particular individuals who happened to embody it at any given time. Second, by comparison with the conspicuously activist, highly interventionist states of modernity, Demos was a peculiarly inert kind of agency. In its primary incarnations in assembly meetings and law courts, its function was to serve as a purely deliberative rule-making body, in that it materialized to produce binding resolutions to issues raised by “civilians,” whether they were its assembly “advisors” or the prosecutors in court cases. Third, given that Athenian households were assumed to be largely responsible for governing themselves, both individually and collectively, the competence of Demos was necessarily limited. Essentially, it was responsible for producing binding decisions only on those matters which households could not already manage for themselves, like polis-wide cults, diplomacy, and warfare. In short, to summarize chapters 12-14, demokratia in Attica was not a modern-style “state-centered” form of rule. It was an ongoing exercise in self-management by the unitary social body of Demos, whether acting as its constituent parts or as the totality of the whole.
The Circulation of Life’s Resources
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

To conclude the book’ s alternative account of the Athenian politeia, the chapter offers a recursive analysis of the resource flows which made this way of life possible. The result is very different from a conventional modern secular economic analysis. Instead, it treats resource transactions as the lifeblood of a cosmic ecology that united gods, land, and people in a condition of symbiotic interdependency. The most important of all these transactions were those between gods and humans, whereby the latter received secure conditions of existence in exchange for temples, sacrifices, votive treasures, and other often costly ritual offerings. The most important of the resource transactions between humans were marriages, whereby the managerial and reproductive capacities of females were transferred from one household to another, thereby perpetuating the life of the social body. Contrary to the “egalitarian” ethos which moderns believe animated “democratic Athens,” demokratia would also have been unsustainable without the innumerable contributions of resources, material and otherwise, that were made by a relatively small number of super-wealthy Athenian households. And in a polis where members typically worked only for themselves, the existence of these ecologically essential super-wealthy households would have been unsustainable without the routine exploitation of slaves.
Being in a Different World
Authors: Anderson Greg
Published: October 2018

After summarizing the book’ s alternative recursive analysis of the Athenian politeia, the chapter confronts three possible objections to this new account. First, despite possible appearances to the contrary, this kind of ontological history can in fact accommodate the “messiness” of “real life.” While its primary purpose is to recover the ontological and metaphysical commitments which were presupposed by Athenian demokratia, it is not necessarily contradicted by evidence for conduct that might seem to defy those commitments. Second, nor is this kind of analysis necessarily contradicted by the texts of, say, Plato, Thucydides, or other contemporary intellectuals which seem to offer us very different accounts of Greek “realities.” Such texts represent the thought of only a tiny elite minority, intellectuals who were expressly challenging conventional presuppositions about the givens of existence. And it is those conventional presuppositions which the book is primarily concerned with, since they constituted the “world-making common sense” of the age, the social knowledge that was at once presupposed and reproduced by the most vital life-sustaining practices of the Athenians, the thought which actively helped to make their world whatever it really was at the time. By contrast, elite oppositional claims were merely ideational constructs, mere renegade “worldviews.” Third, while the book’ s ontological history is written in the synchronic mode, treating the classical era as a single extended moment, this does not mean that it is incapable of accounting for change. Indeed, as the chapter shows, it is quite possible to imagine a diachronic ontological history.
Introduction
Authors: Atkins Richard Kenneth
Published: October 2018

John Locke and Thomas Nagel dismiss the suggestion that seeing a scarlet red is like hearing a trumpet’s blare. Charles S. Peirce, however, argues that because there are no ideas that are unanalyzable and completely determinate, we should be able to develop an objective phenomenological vocabulary to describe the similarities and differences among diverse experiences. By developing a table of the most general classes into which elements of consciousness fall, Peirce aims to develop an objective phenomenological vocabulary. The key to developing such a vocabulary is a theory of formal logic. As Kant had proposed we base a table of the metaphysical categories on the logical forms of judgments, Peirce recommends we base a table of the phenomenological categories on the logical forms of propositions.
From Phenomenology to Phaneroscopy
Authors: Atkins Richard Kenneth
Published: October 2018

Peirce first recognizes a science of phenomenology in 1902, but in 1904 he changes the name of the science to phaneroscopy. This change is motivated by a desire for terminological exactness. After rejecting “phenomena,” “pure experience,” and “idea” as appropriate words for the object of phenomenological investigation, Peirce settles on “phaneron.” He changes the suffix from “-logy” to “-scopy” to indicate that the science is primarily observational. Peirce’s characterizations of the phaneron change over the course of his investigations because of four problems he faces. Those problems are whether the phenomenologist studies the possibilities of consciousness or actual consciousnesses, how we can generalize observations of our own conscious experiences to what any conscious experience is like, how we can make our conception of the object of phenomenological investigation clearer, and how we can speak of the phaneron as a totality and yet reference its parts.
The Phenomenological Categories
Authors: Atkins Richard Kenneth
Published: October 2018

Peirce distinguishes between two sets of phenomenological categories, the formal quantitative categories and the material qualitative categories. The former are isolated by direct attentional inspective analysis wherein the formal and logical categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness are employed as heuristics. The formal quantitative phenomenological categories are quality, brute reaction, and representation, and they are also evident in temporality as presentness, pastness, and futurity and in modality as possibility, actuality, and necessity. The material qualitative categories are positiveness and negativeness and are correlated with the extremes of a continuum. I first provide an overview of the categories and then I chronologically present the developments in Peirce’s thinking about these categories.
How Seeing a Scarlet Red Is Like Hearing a Trumpet’s Blare
Authors: Atkins Richard Kenneth
Published: October 2018

Peirce’s categories can be used to develop an objective phenomenological vocabulary. Contrary to the derisive attitudes of John Locke and Thomas Nagel, Peirce’s vocabulary can be used to describe how seeing a scarlet red is like hearing a trumpet’s blare. Both experiences involve qualities and qualities of qualities with high intensities. Both experiences are vivid and have an accompanying feeling of vividness, each of which is of a high intensity. In neither case can the object of experience be altered by direct, immediate, and voluntary mental effort. Moreover, both experiences are unlike vaguely remembering a pillow falling into one’s lap. Peirce’s account is corroborated by research into synesthesia. Peirce’s phenomenological vocabulary may also be used to develop descriptions of what it is like to be a bat.
Random Families
Authors: Hertz Rosanna , Nelson Margaret K.
Published: October 2018

This is a book about unprecedented families—networks of strangers linked by genes, medical technology, and the human desire for affinity and identity. It chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make—how to conceive, how to place sperm donors in their family tree, and what to do when it suddenly becomes clear that there are children out there that share half their child’s DNA. Do shared genes make you family? Do children find anything in common? What becomes of the random networks that arise once the members of the families of donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children and parents from all over the United States, Hertz and Nelson explore what it means to children to be a donor sibling and what it’s like to be a parent who discovers four, six, or even a dozen children who share half the DNA of one’s own child. At the heart of their investigation are remarkable relationships woven from tenuous bits of information and fueled by intense curiosity. The authors suggest that donor siblings are expanding the possibilities for extended kinship in the United States.