bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cartesian Composites
Authors: Hoffman Paul
Published: November 2023

Toward the end of an essay in which I argued that Descartes thinks a human being is a genuine unity, I invited other commentators to come to Descartes’s defense by accounting for his apparently contradictory claims that a human being is an ens per se and that it is an ens per accidens.1 These claims seem to be contradic-tory, because in saying that a human being is an ens per se, Descartes appears to be asserting that a human being is genuinely one, and in saying that a human being is an ens per accidens, he appears to assert that a human being is not genuinely one, but instead is a mere heap or aggregate. In the ensuing eleven years, no one has taken up my invitation, except to argue that I was mistaken in claiming that Descartes thinks a human being has per se unity in any robust sense.
beginning in the speech-inflection range ⁽the onset⁾
Authors: Miller Richard
Published: November 2023

Registration and acoustic events encountered in other registers will later be considered but, for the moment, deliberation is restricted to the range in which the speaking voice is normally inflected. Before concentrating on upper-range extension, the wise singer (with his teacher) will look for freedom of production in the range of the singing voice that most closely parallels speech. It should be kept in mind that “vowelization” and “vocalization” have a common etymological origin. A frequent axiom found in early treatises on singing advised that, when singing in the speech-inflection range, one ought to sing as one speaks (“Si canta come si  parla”). This admonition pertains to both acoustics and physiology, but “singing like speaking” is limited to the speech-inflection range. (Beyond the speech range, physiologic and acoustic alterations are necessitated.) Although the singer must learn to use his voice in highly specialized ways, his singing voice is the same instrument as the one with which he speaks. The dictum “one sings as one speaks, when in the speech-inflection range” stands in contradiction to systems that claim the speaking voice must be altered and rebuilt for the strenuous tasks of singing. There is a theory of voice training that claims to recover the primitive aspects of voicing, predicated on the premise that before the emergence of speech—presumably in some vocal Atlantis—the singing voice was uninhibited. In that singular technique, primitive nonspeech sounds are promoted in the hope of recovering the origins of the singing voice. (I will refrain from describing the batteries of sounds recommended by adherents of this somewhat bizarre technique.) Such assumptions are contrary to what is known anthropologically about the development of speech in prehistoric periods of early human existence.
vowel modification ⁽”cover”⁾, energization, and range equalization
Authors: Miller Richard
Published: November 2023

As soon as the baritone, bass-baritone, or bass concentrates on equalizing timbre from lower to middle and upper ranges, two important factors come to the fore: (1) a gradated increase in breath energy (but not a higher rate of breath expulsion), and (2) an adjustment of the vocal tract through vowel modification. Although we have looked at both of these areas in passing, we now concentrate on them from a somewhat different perspective. Our first consideration concerns the role breath energy—breath “support”—plays during the process of vowel modification and in timbre equalization. As mentioned earlier, voice treatises have described the lower registration point as the “first register break,” known historically as the primo passaggio. It also has been termed “the first lift of the breath,” with the secondo passaggio then being called “the second register break” or “the second lift of the breath” (see chapter 1). Some teachers speak of “flipping over” at the second passaggio; others (God forgive!) refer to placing a “lid” on the tone, or to “hooking in” the voice. These descriptive phrases attempt to subjectively describe what is a learnable process, in accordance with natural vowel modification and breath-management adjustments. Systems that ask the singer to manufacture drastic mechanical changes in order to “cover” are excessive.
Further Consideration Of “Resonance” In Baritone, Bass-Baritone, And Bass Voices
Authors: Miller Richard
Published: November 2023

What actually is meant when a low-voiced male is said to have a “resonant voice”? The term denotes a trained voice that carries easily over an orchestra and reveals chiaroscuro balance (“ring” and “richness”). Every professionally motivated singer hopes to achieve it. How is it accomplished? Unless the singer understands what forms the chiaroscuro tone, and until he possesses the physiologically and acoustically initiated responses to arrive at it, he will be mostly at sea, constantly in search of an idiosyncratic compass. He (possibly his teacher) will try to invent functions unknown to the rest of mankind. Information regarding the physiologic and acoustic components of the resonant sound should not be regarded as mere extraneous data. It provides an essential factual foundation. Building on that knowledge, the low-voiced male is able to establish kinesthetic responses that are as secure as the tasks he undertakes in everyday living (see chapter 4).
More On Positioning Of The Larynx
Authors: Miller Richard
Published: November 2023

During speech, the laryngeal position tends to fluctuate slightly, because the tongue, the hyoid bone, and the larynx function as an anatomical unit. At passaggi pivotal points, the larynx ought to stay in a relatively stable position, without conscious manipulation. It has been previously pointed out that inexperienced male singers tend to elevate the head and chin (hence the larynx) for pitches that lie beyond speech range. In so doing, they inhibit the internal adjustment of the vocal ligaments and the vocalis muscle that should occur in ascending pitch. Timbre then remains “chest” dominant, and the production sounds “pushed,” as in calling or shouting, at which time the head is elevated (see chapter 1).
Dynamic Control, Mezza Voce , And The Messa Di Voce
Authors: Miller Richard
Published: November 2023

With most young male singers, it is difficult to adhere immediately to every subtle dynamic indicated in the song and opera literatures, particularly in and above the zona di passaggio region. Mezza voce (literally, half voice) is a sophisticated skill. As Giovanni Battista Lamperti maintained, mezza voce tone should in all respects be the same as forte, except be softer. Legitimate mezza voce requires an increase—not a decrease— in the appoggio activity. A well-known pedagogic rubric: “Sing piano, support forte.” The messa di voce is markedly different from mezza voce. With the messa di voce, the phrase begins at p or pp dynamic level, gradually advances to f or , and then returns to p or pp intensity. The messa di voce has long been considered a test as to how well breath emission and vocal-fold approximation are coordinated. In a 1782 treatise titled “Mr. Tenducci to His Scholars,” Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci succinctly states: “To sing messa di voce—swelling of the tone—begin pianissimo and gradually increase to forte in the first part of the tone; then gradually diminish to the conclusion of each note.”
The Background
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

before considering verdi’s own contribution it may be useful to take a brief look at the operatic world into which he was born and the kind of opera to which he was heir. It was not the cosmopolitan Italian opera of the eighteenth century; for by Verdi’s time Italy’s musical hegemony was in the past. She had long been a stranger to the German symphonic tradition which was to nourish German opera. The Napoleonic Wars had disrupted communications between peoples; and Napoleon himself, if only for tactical reasons, had fostered nationalism in his subject states and nowhere more successfully than in the Peninsula. Italian patriots looked on him as their friend and deliverer just as they viewed Nelson as their enemy. The collapse of the empire was followed by an explosion of opera in which the sense of national identity awakened in the previous decade was powerfully affirmed. In 1823 that staunch Italophile Stendhal wrote: ‘Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, his name is constantly on every tongue. The fame of this hero knows no bounds save those of
Choral and Religious Works
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

all italian composers of the nineteenth century had at some time to write religious music, whether as part of their training or for performance by their local community. But by the time of Verdi’s youth the great liturgical traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had long since declined. Masses consisted mostly of arid counterpoint in the choruses and operatic brilliance or sentimentality in the arias. Even those of Donizetti and Bellini barely rise above this level. Solemn beginnings too often decline into sugary ends.
Introduction
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

When E.T.A Hoffmann had his fictional character Kapellmeister Johannes Kreist quote an ancient law prohibiting ̒noisy labourers from living next to educated gentlemen̓ he had a single purpose in mind. He wanted to know why ̒poor oppressed composers̓ of his day (the early 1800s),who had to ̒sell their inspirations for a price̓ were unable to make use of this law and ̒banish themselves from the neighboured of windbages and bores̒.
A Platonist Theory of Musical Works
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

Jerrold Levinson offers a modified Platonist view. He argues that musical works exist as abstract entities apart from their performances and scores, and that the identity and individuation of performances involves intentional and recognitional components. Both claims pave the way for an ontological account unavailable to a nominalist and extensionalist like Goodman. I shall treat Levinson’s account of works and performances separately and I shall pay more attention, as the author does himself, to the former than the latter. As in the previous chapter the purpose is not to seek the best analytic theory of musical works. It is to discover what analysts think are the important questions. and most satisfactory kinds of answer when they produce theories of this sort.
Deconstructing d’Indy, or the Problem of a Composer’s Reputation
Authors: Pasler Jann
Published: November 2023

The story of a life, like history, is an invention. Certainly the biographer and historian have roles in this invention, but so, too, does the composer, for whom making music necessarily entails building and maintaining a reputation. Reputation is the fruit of talents, knowledge, and achievements that attract attention. It signals renown, the way someone is known in public or the sum of values commonly associated with a person. If it does not imply public admiration, it does suggest that the public takes an interest in the person in question. The ordinary sense of the word refers to the public’s notion of someone well after death—the social consensus articulated by the biographer—as well as the quasi-historical judgment that we make with the distance of time. This often produces the semblance of authority, the authority of one manifest meaning. In reality, reputation is also the result of the steps taken during a professional life to assure one’s existence as a composer, a process involving actions, interactions, and associations as well as works. This includes all efforts to earn credibility, respect, distinction, and finally prestige. As Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, these inevitably take place in a social space, be it of teachers, friends and enemies, social and professional contacts, institutions, jobs, awards, or critics, any of whom may influence the conception, creation, or reception of art.
Casting Shadows: Fieldwork Is Dead! Long Live Fieldwork! Introduction
Authors: Cooley Timothy J , Barz Gregory
Published: November 2023

Music’s ephemeral nature predisposes ethnomusicologists to embrace multiple realities. As Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests, “Music ... bring[s] man face to face with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized” (1969:17–18). Ethno-musicologists often feel as if they are chasing shadows in the field—striving to perceive and understand the liminal quality of musical meaning. The often ambiguous quality of musical meaning invites ethnomusicologists into a dialogue of multiple realities, a dialogue shared by social scientists endeavoring to understand other aspects of cultural practices. With a spirit of unboundedness, Shadows in the Field focuses on chasing shadows—on fieldwork—from a stance of ideological diversity to ask what it is that compels us toward fieldwork for methodological foundation. What is fieldwork, what does it accomplish, and how can we do it better? Long relegated to private conversations and hushed statements about what really happens in “the field,” this book emerged out of a desire to provide a forum for making explicit contemporary theories involving fieldwork in ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology enjoys the advantages of being an inherently interdisciplinary discipline, seemingly in a perpetual state of experimentation that gains strength from a diversity and plurality of approaches (Killick 2003; Rice 1987; 2003; A. Seeger 1987a:491–94; 1992:107; 1997). In this sense, ethnomusicologists are in a unique position to question established methods and goals of the social sciences, and to explore new perspectives. These new perspectives are not just for ethno-musicologists but also for all ethnographic disciplines.
(Un)doing Fieldwork Sharing Songs, Sharing Lives
Authors: Kisliuk Michelle
Published: November 2023

In the ethnography of musical performance we are particularly challenged, as writers, to present or re-present the experiential since performance is experience. The project of aligning form and content—writing and experience—is one way in which a focus on field research is reshaping ethnography. One might argue that all ethnography be considered ethnography of performance, since culture itself is at some level inevitably enacted. But the relative specificity of music, while always embedded in and enabled by other performance modes, can provide a heightened example of performance processes. A focus on the ethnography of musical performance—overdue in the ethnographic arena—can suggest incisive ways of researching, writing about, and understanding cultural processes.
From Contumacy to Shame: Reading Beckett’s Testimonies with Agamben
Authors: Jones David Houston
Published: November 2023

What interests Giorgio Agamben above all in his groundbreaking account of testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz is the juxtaposition of the sayable and the unsayable, and in particular the inscription of the unsayable within the sayable: “in opposition to the archive, which designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said, we give the name testimony to the system of relations between the inside and outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language” (145).
Projections: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I as Autobiographies
Authors: Locatelli Carla
Published: November 2023

The worldwide celebrations of an empirical author usually identified as the flesh-and-blood Samuel Barclay Beckett—born in Cooldrinagh, Ireland, in 1906—bring to the fore concerns about the auto- biographical aspects of his work. Beckett’s centenary prompts me to reflect on the status of autobiography in the Beckett canon within a framework that builds on the latest epistemological considerations about autobiographical reading and honors the antilyrical stakes set forth in Beckett’s works.
“I Am Not a Philosopher”
Authors: Abbott H Porter
Published: November 2023

The question i am addressing in this essay does not have to do with Beckett’s extensive and deeply engaged reading of philosophy. And only by indirection does it have to do with the multitude of philosophical issues that are at stake in his work and that were clearly inflected by his reading. This is ground that has been covered so extensively and so ably by others that I have little chance of improving on their insights.
Beckett’s Romanticism
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: November 2023

The Beckett Centenary offers us the rare opportunity to consider not only the richness of his literary legacy but also the dynamics of the daunting critical response to his work. As the present volume illustrates, that work itself has proved to be remarkably resilient, surviving at long last the onslaught of the new critics with their careful and ingenious close readings; the ambitious poststructuralists who followed in their wake; scrupulous biographers and others much less so; intertextualists, postmodernists, formalists, feminists; historicists both old and new; as well as other well-trained theorists inspired by nothing less than wholesale de- construction (a note of caution here: even a bold thinker like Herbert Blau wondered if it was finally possible to deconstruct Beckett, the Frenchified Irishman posing as some sort of Jacques Derrida avant la lettre—or more likely, especially to my way of thinking, it’s the other way around).
Beckett’s Theater: Embodying Alterity
Authors: Mcmullan Anna
Published: November 2023

The national and international celebrations throughout 2006 in honor of the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth have confirmed his status as a global cultural figure. In a trajectory illustrative of Pascale Casa- nova’s paradigm of the minority writer who leaves the limited literary field of his native country and installs himself in the literary metro pole, Beckett left Dublin in 1937 to settle in Paris until his death in 1989. He continually crossed linguistic borders through his wide multilingual reading as a student of modern languages at Trinity College Dublin, his translations of Mexican poetry,2 his theatrical directing in Germany, and, of course, his bilingual writing and self-translation.
Re-Figuring the Stage Body through the Mechanical Re-Production of Memory
Authors: Rodríguez-Gago Antonia
Published: November 2023

Samuel Beckett’S Krapp’s Last Tape has been read in numerous ways, most often as a parody of Proust’s ideas on the workings of involuntary memory, demonstrating the impossibility of recovering the past, even when memories have been mechanically archived on magnetic tape; or as a paradigm of the Cartesian dualism analyzed through binary images of mind/body, spirit/flesh, change/changelessness. In this essay I will discuss the play from a different point of view: the relationship established between the stage figure of Krapp and the recorded voice of memory, particularly the process of the protagonist’s creation, that is, how Beckett re-figures in performance the protagonist’s body through the mechanical reproduction of memory.
Words and Music, . . . but the clouds . . ., and Yeats’s “The Tower”
Authors: Okamuro Minako
Published: November 2023

Words And Music (1962) contains no direct reference to William Butler Yeats, but some hints of the poet and his works can be found in its language. The radio play has three characters, if we can call them “characters”: Words called Joe, Music called Bob, and their master, Croak. At the beginning, Croak requests forgiveness from Words and Music for his belated arrival, saying: “Be friends! [Pause.] I am late, forgive. [Pause.] The face. [Pause.] On the stairs. [Pause.] Forgive.
Staging Sam: Beckett as Dramatic Character
Authors: Zeifman Hersh
Published: November 2023

On 3 January 1956, Waiting for Godot had its now notorious American premiere at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. The critical (and, more important, audience) response was mostly baﬄed and dismissive: the play was viewed as incomprehensible, an Irish/Gallic hoax. When Godot opened on Broadway later that spring, its producers were so desperate for an audience that they were reduced to advertising for “seventy thousand intellectuals” (Knowlson 350); only intellectuals, it seems, could appreciate such an abstruse and deeply enigmatic work.
The History of Migraine from Hippocrates to Harold Wolff
Authors: Boes Christopher J , Dalessio Donald J
Published: November 2023

In his superb monograph on migraine published in 1932, Henry Alsop Riley wrote (Riley, 1932): If one should search for the human ill which has manifested itself most widely during all times and among all people, there can be but little doubt that headache would attain this unenviable distinction. It is not surprising, therefore, that one form of this disorder, migraine, perhaps the most baffling and dramatic form of pain in the head should have acquired recognition as a definite symptom-complex early in medical history. (p. 429) A student of the history of medicine quickly realizes that much has been written about migraine over the centuries, partly because many physicians and scientists have suffered from the ailment. For example, John Hughlings Jackson, considered the father of English neurology, once told a younger colleague who had approached him: “Stop! I am just observing my migraine” (Critchley and Critchley, 1998).
Pathophysiology of Aura
Authors: Eikermann-Haerter Katharina , Moskowitz Michael
Published: November 2023

Among the more typical forms of migraine headache, migraine with aura is the best studied and arguably the best understood. Migraine aura is common, affecting up to 5% of the adult population (Agostoni and Aliprandi, 2006). Migraine aura is associated with neurologic symptoms that often spread over a characteristic time frame and in most cases precede the development of a migraine-like headache. Ninety-nine percent of aura patients experience visual phenomenon in at least some attacks, whereas 54% and 32% describe sensory and/or aphasic aura, respectively (Kirchmann, 2006). If more than a single symptom develops, the auras tend to occur in succession; almost all individuals describe symptoms of visual aura. Positive symptoms (shimmering lights, zigzagging line, or paresthesia) are sometimes followed by negative symptoms, such as a scotoma or numbness.
Genetics of Primary Headache
Authors: Ferrari Michel D , Dichgans Martin
Published: November 2023

Recent advances in genetics have started to transform our understanding of primary headaches. There is increasing evidence for a genetic component to cluster headache (CH) and tension-type headache (TTH). However, the greatest breakthroughs have occurred in the area of migraine, a dynamic field in which data are rapidly accumulating. In this chapter, we discuss key findings and recent developments in genetic epidemiology, monogenic disorders, knock-in mouse models, and complex multifactorial genetics. Migraine often runs in families (Kors et al., 2004). Population-based studies have confirmed that the risk of migraine in first-degree relatives is increased 1.5–4-fold. The familial risk appeared greatest for patients with migraine with aura, with a young age at onset, and a high attack severity and disease disability (Russell and Olesen, 1995; Stewart et al., 1997; Stewart et al., 2006).
Migraine Treatment
Authors: Silberstein Stephen D , Freitag, Frederick G , Bigal Marcelo E
Published: November 2023

Migraine is a chronic neurologic disease characterized by episodic attacks of headache and associated symptoms (Headache Classification Committee, 2004). In U.S. population studies, migraine prevalence is approximately 18% in women and 6% in men (Lipton and Silberstein, 2001; Lipton et al., 2001, 2007). Approximately 90% of migraine sufferers have moderate or severe pain. Three-quarters of migraineurs have a reduced ability to function and one-third require bed rest during their attacks (Lipton et al., 2001; Lipton et al., 2007). Therefore, effective treatments and treatment strategies play a critical role in reducing the disability, burden, and cost of care for these patients (Matchar et al., 2000). This chapter relied on the triptan meta-analysis (Ferrari et al., 2001), the Technical Reports of the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research (Goslin et al., 1999; Gray, Goslin, et al., 1999; Gray et al., 1999b, 1999c), U.S. Headache Consortium Guidelines (Ramadan et al., 1999; Matchar et al., 2000), and the recent update of the headache guidelines (SDS in future press).
Headaches Associated with Vascular Disorder(D)
Authors: Diener Hans-Christoph , Dodick David W
Published: November 2023

Many vascular disorders of the brain present with headache as the leading or an important symptom. Headache in vascular conditions presents acutely and with neurological signs and symptoms. The temporal relationship between the onset of headache and neurological symptoms and signs helps to make the correct diagnosis. In most vascular disorders such as ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, headache is overshadowed by focal signs or overlooked because of disorders of consciousness. In conditions such as subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) or arteritis, headache is usually the most prominent symptom. In a number of other diseases that may lead to both headache and stroke [dissection, cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT), and temporal arteritis] headache is often an initial warning symptom. It is therefore crucial to recognise the association of headache with these vascular disorders to initiate appropriate treatment.
Giant Cell Arteritis and Polymyalgia Rheumatica
Authors: Schwedt Todd J , Hunder, Gene G , Dodick David W
Published: November 2023

Headache is the most common presenting symptom of giant cell (temporal) arteritis (GCA) in an elderly patient (Hollenhorst et al., 1960; Caselli, Daube, et al., 1988). Headache is a prominent symptom in approximately 70% of patients, and the initial symptom in one-third of patients (Caselli, Daube, et al., 1988). The headache itself may be clinically nonspecific, but it generally represents a new symptom in patients who do not have a history of prior headaches, or a different type of headache in patients with a preexisting history of headache. It is characteristically throbbing, continuous, and focally worst in the temporal or, less often, occipital region. Many patients may have swollen, erythematous, and painful superficial temporal arteries (Fig. 26–1). An elevated erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) or C-reactive protein (CRP) can provide a timely diagnosis and guide early treatment, and the diagnosis can be subsequently confirmed with a temporal artery biopsy (TAB). Corticosteroid therapy generally produces symptomatic relief within days. Despite commensurate normalization of the ESR and CRP, active vasculitis probably continues for at least several weeks. GCA can also involve the aortic arch and its branches, resulting in a wide variety of vascular complications; therefore, prompt diagnosis and treatment are imperative.
Sappho Of Lesbos
Authors: Powell Jim
Published: November 2023

Sappho’s poetry made her famous throughout the ancient Greek world, probably within her lifetime. Soon, like the medieval French poet François Villon, she became a subject of legend and figured later as a character in comedy. Surviving biographical facts are few and are transmitted to us mixed up with the lore of fables and with bits of dramatic fiction.* Sappho was born on Lesbos around 630 b.c., probably in the town of Eresos, but spent most of her life in Mytilene, the most important of the island’s five cities. Her mother’s name was Kleïs; her father’s name may have been Skamandronymos. She was orphaned at the age of six. Her family was socially prominent and politically active. Lesbos was settled by Aeolic Greeks in the eleventh century b.c. In Sappho’s time, five generations after Homer, it had a flourishing economic, religious, and artistic culture, connections throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and a vibrant local poetic tradition of long- standing and wide fame.
Probestück
Authors: Kramer Richard
Published: November 2023

Probestück: a test-piece, a demonstration of the performer’s skill, of the composer’s Kunst. What the word denotes extends beyond the notion of mere display to the cognitive process of learning—of a skill acquired in the performance of the piece, of idiomatic practices encoded in its notation, and the understanding of the work as an exemplar of composition, of style, of genre. Beyond these more conventional meanings is another, less commonly met, which reveals itself to the critical mind in the presence of a work that probes the frontiers of meaning: Probestück as a test of mind, of Geist.
Opus 90: In Search of Emanuel Bach
Authors: Kramer Richard
Published: November 2023

There comes a moment, we would like to believe, when Beethoven turns away from the struggle—for him, the defining struggle—to move beyond Mozart, beyond the dialectics of the Revolutionary years, toward something other. To specify such a moment as a turn, an inflection, in some other direction, seems to me helpful in setting a convincing context for Beethoven’s increasingly focused investigations of earlier (and still earlier) music during a relatively silent patch that begins around 1812.
Lisch aus, mein Licht: Song, Fugue, and the Symptoms of a Late Style
Authors: Kramer Richard
Published: November 2023

“Mit inniger Empfindung, doch entschlossen, wohl akzentuirt u. sprechend vorgetr[agen]”: with intimate feeling, yet resolutely, well accented, and sung as though spoken. Beethoven inscribed this elaborate instruction on the inside cover of a small notebook—the so-called Boldrini sketchbook—used during the autumn of 1817. Gustav Nottebohm (who described the contents of the book before it vanished shortly after 1890) observed that “inniger” seemed to have been a second thought, added a bit later.
Toward an Epistemology of Fragment
Authors: Kramer Richard
Published: November 2023

Behind the shameless pretense of its title, the modest intention of this chapter is to come closer to the disorderly notion of fragment, as the term was employed in the decades close on either side of 1800. Any such theorizing would need to reconcile two extreme conditions of fragment: on the one hand, fragment taken to denote the flawed torso of the work left unfinished; on the other, fragment taken to suggest the Romantic condition toward which even the finished works of those volatile years might aspire.
Walter Benjamin and the Apprehending of Beauty
Authors: Kramer Richard
Published: November 2023

“Every perfect work is the death mask of its intuition.” Returning finally to the epigraph that set this book in motion, we are reminded that Walter Benjamin tried out his lapidary thought in January 1924 in one among several letters on art, history and criticism to his intellectual confidant, Florens Christian Rang. And then, as if to exemplify the wisdom of what he wrote, he cleansed it in revision, making it over into something less daring. “The work is the death mask of conception,” he now wrote, as the final entry in “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses,” in the miscellany published as Einbahnstrasse in 1928. Benjamin draws back now from the extremity of perfection. The mysteries implicit in intuition give place to conception, decidedly less mysterious, more rational.
“The Medical Self ‘: Self-doctoring and Choosing Doctors
Authors: Klitzman Robert
Published: November 2023

As their disease progressed, these physicians were finally forced to acknowledge their illness in some way, but had to decide exactly how and to what degree to do so. After all, they could treat themselves, order and interpret their own lab tests, and prescribe medications—choosing drugs, doses, and lengths of treatment. These capabilities could all help. Yet such self-doctoring had limitations.
“Screw-ups”: External Obstacles Faced in Becoming Patients
Authors: Klitzman Robert
Published: November 2023

Medical errors occur, yet now, for the first time, many of these physicians became fully aware of, and reflected on, the range of problems and lapses in health care—from fatal flaws to poor communication. They faced challenges, too, in how to respond to these shortfalls, either as patients or as fellow doctors. As patients, they now faced hurdles due not only to their illness and self-doctoring, but also to deficiencies in the wider medical system. They evaluated their treatments as patients from the perspectives of fellow doctors. Lay patients need to be aware of these issues as well—to prepare for these tensions and inform their expectations, even if they do not lessen their hopes for optimal care.
“Once a Doctor, Always a Doctor?”: Retirement
Authors: Klitzman Robert
Published: November 2023

“Should I still put the ‘Doctor’ in front of my name or not?” Stuart, who retired to teach, asked me. “Is a doctor always a doctor?” What if he or she retires, or no longer sees patients? Does his or her identity then change, and if so, how? Not surprisingly, the possibility of retirement and disability posed these dilemmas. Many of these doctors were not sure when and how to alter or reduce their professional schedules. Inevitably, despite efforts to cope, some contemplated and/or chose retirement, and then had to decide if they were still in fact “physicians.”
Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhāvanirdeśa (Treatise on the Three Natures)
Authors: Garfield Jay L
Published: November 2023

The Trisvabhā vanirdeśa (Rang bzhin gsum nges par bstan pa) is one of Vasubandhu’s short treatises (the others being the Treatise in Twenty Stanzas [Vi   satikā ] and the Treatise in Thirty Stanzas [Tri śikā kirikā]) expounding his Cittamātra, or mind-only philosophy. Vasubandhu and his older brother Asa ga are regarded as the founders and principal exponents of this Buddhist idealist school, which developed in the fourth or fifth century C.E. as the major philosophical rival within the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition to the older Madhyamaka tradition. The latter school, founded by Nāgārjuna, urges the emptiness—the lack of essence or substantial, independent reality—of all things, including both external phenomena and mind. Vasubandhu, however, reinterprets the emptiness of the object as being its lack of external reality, and its purely mind-dependent, or ideal, status. At the same time, however, he argues that the foundational mind is nonempty since it truly exists as the substratum of the apparent reality represented in our experience. The position is hence a kind of idealism akin to, but different in important ways from, the idealisms defended by such Western philosophers as Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer.
Dōgen’s “Mountains and Waters as Sū tras” (Sansui-kyō )
Authors: Parkes Graham
Published: November 2023

This poetic and profound chapter of Dōgen’s (1200–53) Shōbō genzō was first delivered as a lecture in the year 1240.The title—Sansui (literally: “mountains waters”) means “landscape” and Kyō refers to the scriptures of the Buddha’s oral teachings—expresses a central idea in Japanese Buddhist philosophy: that the natural world can be experienced and understood both as a spiritual sermon and sacred scripture, as a spoken and written expression of the Buddhist teachings. Some background may render this more understandable.
Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakósa: The Critique of the Soul
Authors: Goodman Charles
Published: November 2023

Chapter 9 of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa (c. fourth/fifth century C.E.) examines the nature of the person and seeks to refute the view that the essence of each person is a real, ultimately existing self. After criticizing the position of the Pudgalavādins, as in the selection translated in the previous chapter, Vasubandhu proceeds at the end of the chapter to consider those Indian philosophers who unapologetically defend the existence of the ā tman. This Sanskrit term can simply mean “self,” but here it refers more specifically to an immortal soul, the owner of a body and of mental states, and the subject of experiences of happiness and suffering. The stakes in the debate about the existence of the soul are quite high: according to Vasubandhu, spiritual seekers cannot attain liberation as long as they accept the existence of the soul. Liberation can be achieved only by completely eradicating all forms of belief in a self.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism
Authors: Edelglass William
Published: November 2023

Some critics claim that the Buddhist emphasis on liberation from samsara, the cycle of birth and suffering, has been accompanied by a neglect of worldly liberation. Moreover, critics charge, Buddhists have no deep motivation to work for social justice; in a world governed by the universal justice of karma, there are no innocent victims. The law of karma is said to justify the status quo because worldly suffering is recognized as the inevitable ripening of karmic consequences. While scholars debate the historical accuracy of this critique, many contemporary Buddhist leaders, in Asia and in the West, have been working to formulate Buddhist responses to worldly suffering. Engaged Buddhists argue that social and institutional violence, though veiled, is often pervasive and difficult to subvert, even as it causes extensive and extreme suffering. Therefore, Buddhists, who have always been concerned with suffering and violence, are called to take action against social and institutional oppression and injustice. As the Dalai Lama argues, we have a “universal responsibility.”
Joanna Macy The Ecological Self
Authors: Edelglass William
Published: November 2023

In a widely read article published in 1967, Lynn White, Jr. argued that how we conceive of nature and the place of humans in the environment will determine how we use natural resources and impact the world around us. According to White, the devaluation of nature and the pervasive anthropocentrism of Western philosophical and religious traditions were the root causes of the ecological crisis.He suggested that Buddhism was more suitable to an ecologically sustainable way of life because Buddhists conceive human beings to be wholly interdependent with the more-than-human world. In the last few decades, scholars have produced more nuanced views of the ecological theories and practices of both Asian and Western religious traditions. Still, Buddhist traditions have become fertile sources for many thinkers seeking to reconceive the human-nature relationship with the hope of providing a theoretical foundation for ecologically sustainable ways of being in the world.
Settlers and Squatters
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

When William Penn died, none of his three sons with Hannah Callowhill Penn—John “the American,” Thomas, and Richard—had reached twenty-one, the age of inheritance. Hannah had been running Pennsylvania since her husband’s incapacitation in 1712, and she continued to do so until her death in 1726. She bequeathed half of Pennsylvania to John and a quarter each to Thomas and Richard. The inheritance, however, was contested. William Penn had an older son, almost twenty years John Penn’s senior, from his first marriage. William Penn Jr. received land in Ireland from his father’s will but nothing in Pennsylvania, which he believed was rightfully his. He disputed the inheritance until his death in 1720, and his son Springett continued the dispute until he died in 1731. Springett’s brother, William Penn III, then executed a release of his claims on Pennsylvania, and the case was finally resolved in favor of the Callowhill Penns.
Expansion
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

Most western settlers were farmers of one kind or another. On Lancaster Plain, German and English farmers cultivated grain and raised animals, initially for subsistence and eventually for the market. The more prosperous among them sometimes owned one or two slaves. Further west and north, where the hill-side soil was thinner, Ulster settlers cleared brush and forest to plant a few acres with oats and other grain and grow some beans, peas, or turnips to feed their families. They also grew hemp and flax, which women spun to make clothing. Once settled most families kept pigs, cattle, or sheep, which foraged in the woods. On substantial farms oxen were used for plowing and horses for human transportation. As the number of settlers grew, one farmer in a given area might set up a grist mill to grind his own and his neighbors’ wheat, corn, and rye into flour and meal. Another might set up a distillery to produce liquor from corn, barley, and rye for commercial use, though most farmers also kept their own personal stills.
Braddock’s Defeat
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

In 1754, responding to the emerging imperial crisis in the Ohio country, the British appointed Edward Braddock as commander in chief in North America. A native of Scotland, Braddock was almost sixty years old at the time of his appointment and had been in the British Army for forty-five years. He arrived in Virginia in March 1755 with two Irish regiments and based them at Wills Creek, Maryland, where the land speculators who formed the Ohio Company had built a storage and supply depot. Braddock enlarged the fort and renamed it in honor of his patron, the Duke of Cumberland, a younger son of George II.
Negotiations
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

In May 1756 Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, Robert Morris, sent two messengers to the Wyoming Valley to see if Teedyuscung was interested in making a separate peace. The lieutenant governor and the Indian leader had a mutual interest in reaching a compromise: Morris’s incentive was to stop the attacks on Pennsylvania’s northern front, Teedyuscung’s to retain a permanent homeland in the Wyoming Valley. At the end of May the messengers returned to Philadelphia with word that the Delaware king “was willing to renew the Treaties of Friendship which William Penn had made with his Forefathers.” The Delaware leader “begged that what was past might be foregotten” and declared that he had “laid down the Hatchet, and would never make Use of it any more against the English.” Morris suggested that he and Teedyuscung meet so “that they might have an Opportunity of making these mutual Declarations at a publick Convention.” In the meantime Pennsylvania would observe a thirty-day ceasefire against the Wyoming Indians.1
Westward Journeys
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

At the end of March 1757 as many as 160 Indians gathered at Paxton to meet Sir William Johnson’s deputy, George Croghan. Each of the six Iroquois nations was represented. Among the Indians were thirty Conestoga men, women, and children—probably the entire remnant of their once proud nation. They were led by Sheehays, who, according to Benjamin Franklin, had “assisted” at the treaty his father Connoodaghtoh signed with William Penn in 1701. John Harris Jr. and the Rev. John Elder, the two most prominent residents of Paxton town, attended the meetings. So too did Colonel John Armstrong, the hero of Kittanning. On this occasion Elder and Armstrong must have encountered Sheehays and the Conestogas face to face.
Indian Uprising
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

In June 1762 Sir William Johnson came to Easton to preside over the fifth and last of the Indian conferences in that town. He was determined to settle forever the dispute over the Walking Purchase and to consign Teedyuscung to a position of permanent subordination under the Iroquois. He also wanted to silence Israel Pemberton Jr. No Iroquois representatives attended, but Johnson promoted their interests, and thereby his own. In Thomas Penn he had a new and previously unlikely ally. Penn had long undercut Johnson’s authority by seeking an independent alliance with the Iroquois and dealing unilaterally with the Delawares. But the two men shared a strong dislike of Teedyuscung and Pemberton and had a common antagonist in the Susquehannah Company of Connecticut. The outbreak of the French and Indian War had forced the Company to postpone its plan to colonize the Wyoming Valley, but in May 1762 the directors voted to send 100 men to the valley, where they established a settlement called Mill Creek, near Wyoming town. The Company’s claim threatened Penn’s political sovereignty and financial interests as well as Johnson’s carefully crafted system of Indian diplomacy.1
Rangers
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

Alarming rumors continued to circulate through the Susquehanna Valley in the summer of 1763. “Three Indians came down the River late last night with intelligence,” according to an unsigned letter from Paxton town on July 21. “They bring an Account of two Nations, the Senecas and Cayoways [Cayugas] declaring War against the English, and joining the Indians to Westward.” These western Senecas and Cayugas (Mingoes) had not actually declared war, but they were sufficiently anti-British to make the rumor plausible. Once the Indians had taken Fort Pitt, the letter continued, they intended to march in a force 900-strong to the west branch of the Susquehanna “and afterwards to march with that Body down the Country.”
The Declaration and Remonstrance
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

Founded by German settlers invited to Pennsylvania by William Penn, Germantown was renowned for its weaving and its manufacture of stockings, shoes, and paper. According to a report received by Philadelphia’s Quaker Monthly Meeting, the number of Paxton Boys who entered Germantown did not exceed 300—far fewer than the 1,500 rumored to be marching from the frontier. Their arrival nonetheless caused a sensation. The town’s most distinguished resident, David Rittenhouse, described how “about fifty of the scoundrels marched by my work-shop—I have seen hundreds of Indians travelling the country, and can with truth affirm, that the behaviour of these fellows was ten times more savage and brutal than theirs.” The Paxton Boys, he claimed, paraded through the streets, “frightening women, by running the muzzles of their guns through windows, swearing and hallooing: attacking men with-out the least provocation; dragging them by their hair to the ground, and pretending to scalp them; shooting a number of dogs and fowls.”1
A Proper Spirit of Jealousy and Revenge
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

When the Paxton Boys agreed to write down their grievances rather than proceed with their march on Philadelphia, daily life in the city returned to its normal busy but well-ordered state. Politically, however, all was in ferment; instead of a war of weapons, a war of words ensued. As the anonymous author of The Apology of the Paxton Volunteers put it, “Our late Conduct at the Conestogo Mannor & Lancaster has occasioned much Speculation, & a great Diversity of Sentiments in this & the neighbouring Governments; some vindicating & others condemning it; some charitably alleviating the Crime, & others maliciously painting it, in the most odious & detestable Colours.” The debate went far beyond the immediate issue of the Conestoga massacres to address the fundamental question of how Pennsylvania ought to be governed. Sixty-three pamphlets dealing with the Paxton affair, either exclusively or as part of a larger debate on government, were published in Philadelphia in 1764, along with ten political cartoons.1
Christian White Savages
Authors: Kenny Kevin
Published: November 2023

Critics of the Paxton Boys challenged all of the arguments advanced by their apologists. At the most basic level, Benjamin Franklin and his allies demanded concrete evidence supporting the contention that the Conestogas had been in league with enemy Indians. They countered the assertion that all Indians were the same by pointing to the profusion of different Indian nations in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Skin color, they argued, was irrelevant in judging people’s character and allegiance. The true “savages” in this case were the Paxton Boys rather than their victims. The anti-Paxton authors lampooned the supposed bravery of the men who had slaughtered the Conestoga Indians, characterizing them as cowards, bigots, traitors, and zealots. And, neatly reversing the accusation that Quakers were unfit to govern, they identified a long Presbyterian tradition of subversion and fanaticism dating back to the English civil wars.