bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contrasting patterns of litterfall seasonality and seasonal changes in litter decomposability in a tropical rainforest region
Authors: Parsons S. A. , Valdez-Ramirez V. , Congdon R. A. , Williams S. E.
Published: September 2014

Abstract. The seasonality of litter inputs in forests has important implications for understanding ecosystem processes and biogeochemical cycles. We quantified the drivers of seasonality in litterfall and leaf decomposability using plots throughout the Australian wet tropical region. Litter fell mostly in the summer (wet, warm) months in the region, but other peaks occurred throughout the year. Litterfall seasonality was modelled well with the level of deciduousness of the site (plots with more deciduous species had lower seasonality than evergreen plots), temperature (higher seasonality in the uplands), disturbance (lower seasonality with more early secondary species) and soil fertility (higher seasonality with higher N : P/P limitation) (SL total litterfall model 1 = deciduousness + soil N : P + early secondary sp.: r2 = 0.63, n = 30; model 2 = temperature + early secondary sp. + soil N : P: r2 = 0.54, n = 30; SL leaf = temperature + early secondary sp. + rainfall seasonality: r2 = 0.39, n = 30). Leaf litter decomposability was lower in the dry season than in the wet season, driven by higher phenolic concentrations in the dry, with the difference exacerbated particularly by lower dry season moisture. Our results are contrary to the global trend for tropical rainforests; in that seasonality of litterfall input was generally higher in wetter, cooler, evergreen forests, compared to generally drier, warmer, semi-deciduous sites that had more uniform monthly inputs. We consider this due to more diverse litter shedding patterns in semi-deciduous and raingreen rainforest sites, and an important consideration for ecosystem modellers. Seasonal changes in litter quality are likely to have impacts on decomposition and biogeochemical cycles in these forests due to the litter that falls in the dry season being more recalcitrant to decay.
Impacts of simulated herbivory on VOC emission profiles from coniferous plants
Authors: Faiola C. L. , Jobson B. T. , VanReken T. M.
Published: September 2014

Abstract. The largest global source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the atmosphere is from biogenic emissions. Plant stressors associated with a changing environment can alter both the quantity and composition of the compounds that are emitted. This study investigated the effects of one global change stressor, increased herbivory, on plant emissions from five different coniferous species: bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata), blue spruce (Picea pungens), western redcedar (Thuja plicata), grand fir (Abies grandis), and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsugas menziesii). Herbivory was simulated in the laboratory via exogenous application of methyl jasmonate, an herbivory proxy. Gas-phase species were measured continuously with a gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer and flame ionization detector (GC-MS-FID). Stress responses varied between the different plant types and even between experiments using the same set of saplings. The compounds most frequently impacted by the stress treatment were alpha-pinene, beta-pinene, 1,8-cineol, beta-myrcene, terpinolene, limonene, and the cymene isomers. Individual compounds within a single experiment often exhibited a different response to the treatment from one another.
Surgery of male infertility: An update
Authors: Franco Giorgio , Misuraca Leonardo , Ciletti Mario , Leonardo Costantino , De Nunzio Cosimo , Palminteri Enzo , De Dominicis Carlo
Published: September 2014

Surgery for male infertility includes three main areas: varicocele surgery, recanalization of seminal tract, sperm retrieval.

Varicocele treatment in infertily is still controversial. Recent scientific evidence appears to demonstrate that in selected cases varicocele treatment is beneficial in improving semen parameters and pregnancy rate. The key for the success of treatment seems to be a correct indication. It is our opinion that varicocele should be treated in presence of abnormal semen parameters, when clinically significant, and in adolescents with atrophy of the affected testis. So far, no specific technique, either surgical, microsurgical or sclerotherapic, can be considered the gold standard. Good results in our hands have been obtained with the microsurgical lymphatic sparing high ligation of internal spermatic vein.

Innovations in surgery for seminal tract obstructions include the new tubular invagination techniques for epididimovasostomy, which showed excellent results with a simplified and time-saving microsurgical approach. In distal obstructions, a new transperineal ultrasound-guided approach has been proposed for the diagnostic work-up and treatment. Advantages of this technique and of the TURED must be balanced with those of immediate sperm retrieval for ART.

In sperm retrieval, microTESE represents the most important surgical evolution in non-obstructive azoospermia. We have recently proposed a new stepwise approach starting with a minimal equatorial incision for conventional testicular biopsy which is extended to perform microTESE only when no sperm is retrieved. In this way microTESE is offered only to patients who really need it. Another field of innovation is sperm retrieval for ICSI in patients with Klinefelter Syndrome.
Mapeamento de anomalias de drenagem: indícios de controle litológico e estrutural na bacia hidrográfica do Cotia, em Cotia – SP, Brasil
Authors: Sousa-Silva Katiucia De , Oliveira Déborah De
Published: September 2014

Este trabalho busca analisar o cenário geomorfológico da bacia hidrográfica do Cotia, em Cotia (SP). O objetivo da pesquisa é a investigação da configuração da rede de drenagem do alto curso do rio em questão, localizado na Reserva Florestal do Morro Grande (RFMG), no qual são encontradas anomalias de drenagem, com destaque para uma sequência de inflexões de 90° no canal. A área de estudo está inserida regionalmente no planalto de Ibiúna, um compartimento geomorfológico constituído por morros e espigões alongados de média a alta declividade, com altitudes que variam de 860 a 1.075 metros. Essa unidade é composta por granitos, gnaisses e migmatitos neoproterozóicos, os quais poderiam indicar a influência de sistemas de juntas no traçado da drenagem. Além da influência litológica como potencial controlador dessa rede, há o fator estrutural, expresso pela ocorrência de falhas transcorrentes, integrantes da Zona de Cisalhamento de Caucaia, que atravessam o Cotia em direção NE-SW. Como métodos de investigação da área, foram adotadas técnicas de fotointerpretação e mapeamento digital (em escalas 1:25.000 e 1:50.000, respectivamente), com o intuito de identificar feições geomorfológicas que contribuam para a compreensão dos processos envolvidos na configuração atual dessa rede de drenagem.
Análise morfossedimentar da praia, antepraia e plataforma continental interna da linha de costa do Parque Nacional de Jurubatiba - Rio de Janeiro
Authors: Machado Giseli Modolo Vieira
Published: September 2014

A análise morfossedimentar do sistema praia-antepraia-plataforma continental interna objetiva caracterizar e identificar os processos hidrodinâmicos e morfossedimentares atuantes no referido sistema e analisar mais detalhadamente a aplicação do conceito de perfil de equilíbrio (Dean 1977). É avaliada a hipótese de que o recobrimento sedimentar na antepraia não controla a forma do perfil de equilíbrio, sendo o substrato reliquiar da antepraia o dominador de tal formato. Análises histórico-geomorfológicas, oceanográficas e sedimentológicas da área e observações de campo permitiram avaliar a estabilidade da linha de costa na faixa costeira do Parque Nacional da Restinga de Jurubatiba - Rio de Janeiro. A forte erosão observada na praia manifestou-se de maneira pontual, consequência de variações de: altura das ondas, principalmente de sul, sudoeste e sul-sudoeste; sedimentos finos e lamosos na antepraia e na plataforma continental interna e orientação da linha de costa. O estado morfodinâmico refletivo da praia e a presença de areia muito fina e lama na antepraia dificultam o deslocamento transversal dos sedimentos, incumbindo a deriva litorânea do papel principal de manutenção do material grosso neste sistema. O histórico geológico-geomorfológico transgressivo da área favorece também uma maior instabilidade deste litoral. Os desequilíbrios morfológicos observados na praia são compensados pelo grande volume de sedimentos mobilizados pela corrente longitudinal de sentido sudoeste-nordeste. A aparente estabilidade desta praia pode estar comprometida caso ocorram alterações do padrão de ondas, como, por exemplo, a intensificação das frentes frias, e/ou, cesse ou seja reduzido o trânsito longitudinal de sedimentos
Avaliação local da vulnerabilidade e riscos de inundação na zona costeira da Região dos Lagos, Rio de Janeiro
Authors: Lins-de-Barros Flavia Moraes , Muehe Dieter
Published: September 2014

A avaliação de riscos costeiros em escala local, incluindo tanto variáveis socioeconômicas quanto físico-ambientais, tem sido um difícil desafio devido à baixa resolução espacial dos dados estatísticos, frequentemente disponíveis apenas para a unidade de distritos. Visando ultrapassar tal dificuldade, é proposta no presente trabalho uma metodologia de avaliação local da vulnerabilidade e dos riscos de inundação costeira e seus impactos sociais atuais e futuros, adotando como unidade de análise os setores censitários urbanos delimitados pelo IBGE. A área de estudo é a Região dos Lagos, localizada na costa leste do estado do Rio de Janeiro, em uma área de rápido crescimento populacional e vocação turística. Uma classificação da vulnerabilidade à erosão, inundação e poluição do lençol freático é apresentada tendo como base a integração dos dados demográficos com dados de trabalhos de campo, estado morfodinâmico das praias e registros de alagamentos. Variáveis relativas à forma de abastecimento de água e de destino do esgoto doméstico por domicílios foram utilizadas para avaliação dos impactos indiretos da inundação na poluição do lençol freático e na disponibilidade de água potável. Foram identificados treze segmentos na costa com elevada a muito elevada vulnerabilidade à transposição por ondas, com construções imediatamente à retaguarda das praias em seis destes. As situações mais críticas correspondem àquelas onde a transposição por ondas está associada ao processo de erosão costeira. Áreas sujeitas a alagamentos foram identificadas em sua maioria na margem norte das lagunas, especialmente no município de Saquarema, com o maior número de registros, dois destes relativos à transposição por ondas. Mais de 75 mil habitantes vivem atualmente nas áreas consideradas vulneráveis a alagamentos, transposição ou erosão costeira, e destes cerca de 3 mil possuem péssimas condições de acesso à água e destinação do esgoto, indicando áreas com elevado potencial de risco de poluição e deficiência de acesso à água.
Petrografia de beachrock em zona costa afora adjacente ao litoral norte do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil
Authors: Cabral Neto Izaac , Córdoba Valéria Centurion , Vital Helenice
Published: September 2014

Foi analisado petrograficamente um corpo rochoso submerso na plataforma norte do Rio Grande do Norte. Esse corpo, denominado “Urca do Minhoto”, dista aproximadamente 18 km da atual linha de costa. Quartzo, bioclastos, feldspatos e fragmentos de rocha formam os principais constituintes do arcabouço. O cimento de carbonato de cálcio está presente sob três tipos distintos: mosaicos de calcita micrítica e de calcita espática equante, ambos ocupando o espaço intergranular, e franjas prismáticas isópacas, precipitadas nas bordas dos grãos. A granulação da rocha varia de areia muito fina a grânulo. O empacotamento frouxo é reflexo da cimentação precoce da rocha, que ocorreu em condições de soterramento raso (eodiagênese).
ENSO impacts on Atlantic watersheds of South America
Authors: Isla Federico Ignacio , Toldo Junior Elirio Ernestino
Published: September 2014

Interannual changes in precipitation cause significant effects on the Pacific watersheds of South America. Large rivers flowing to the Atlantic Ocean as the Paraná and Uruguay are also influenced by ENSO-triggered floods causing significant impacts on the economies of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. At the same time, the floodplains of small rivers are also sensitive to strong ENSOs. Floods occur approximately simultaneously in subtropical watersheds of Brazil and high-latitude watersheds of North Patagonia. ENSO-triggered floods were recorded during the years 1941-42, 1982-83 and 1997-98. Several floods impacted along the Itajaí River affecting the higher (Blumenau city) and lower estuary (Itajaí city). The Guaiba River, at the headlands of Lagoa dos Patos, has repeatedly flooded Porto Alegre. At the Río de la Plata basin, significant increases in the discharges were assigned to the Paraná and the Uruguay rivers.  The small basin of the Quequén Grande River without extended floodplains is subject to periodic failure of its margins. The Colorado River, the northern limit of Patagonia, is allochthonous and its watershed was artificial and progressively modified; the ENSO event of 1983 caused an increase in its salinity due to the sudden reactivation of the Desaguadero-Curacó system.
Australia and Live Animal Export: Wronging Nonhuman Animals
Authors: Coghlan Simon
Published: September 2014

The decades-old trade of exporting nonhuman mammals by ship from Australia became a major political issue in 2011, when video taken by animal rights group Animals Australia was broadcast on television, showing Australian cattle being appallingly abused in Indonesian abattoirs. Taking its cue from the unprecedented response from Australians to the 2011 footage, many of whom were haunted by the video images, this article argues that the live export trade may be seen to wrong nonhuman animals according to several key ethical frameworks.
Art's Undoing
Authors: Pyle Forest
Published: September 2014

Radical aestheticism describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature, offering us the best way to reckon with what takes place at certain moments in texts by Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde. This book explores what happens when these writers, deeply committed to certain versions of ethics, politics, or theology, nonetheless produce an encounter with a radical aestheticism that subjects the authors’ projects to a fundamental crisis. A radical aestheticism offers no positive claims for art, whether on ethical or political grounds or on aesthetic grounds, as in “art for art’s sake.” It provides no transcendent or underlying ground for art’s validation. In this sense, a radical aestheticism is the experience of a poesis that exerts so much pressure on the claims and workings of the aesthetic that it becomes a kind of black hole from which no illumination is possible. The radical aestheticism encountered in these writers, in its very extremity, takes us to the constitutive elements—the figures, the images, the semblances—that are at the root of any aestheticism, an encounter registered as evaporation, combustion, or undoing. It is, therefore, an undoing by and of art and aesthetic experience, one that leaves this important literary tradition in its wake. The book embraces diverse theoretical projects, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida.
“A Light More Dread Than Obscurity”
Authors: Pyle Forest
Published: September 2014

This chapter explores the nature of Shelley’s political investment in the aesthetic. It considers Shelley’s representations of aesthetic experiences, effects, and judgments, and examines how these representations function as constitutive elements in his political poetics. The chapter shows how at some crucial instances this singularly powerful project of a political poetics is subjected to the “storm” of an aestheticism.
The Writer
Authors: Deery Phillip
Published: September 2014

This chapter concerns the Cold War blacklisting of the famous American writer, Howard Fast. The chapter begins with the banning in New York schools of his Citizen Tom Paine, recounts his difficulties publishing in an increasingly hostile environment, and concludes with his defection from the Communist Party in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin in 1956.
Aesthetic Value and Wild Animals
Authors: Brady Emily
Published: September 2014

Emily Brady discusses a question long neglected in environmental aesthetics: on what grounds do we ascribe aesthetic value to wild animals? Recently Glenn Parsons has argued that this value is grounded in the “fitness” of animals in relation to their form, behavior, and traits. Brady contends that Parsons’ “functional beauty” approach overlooks the important role played by expressive qualities in our aesthetic experience of animals. Drawing on expressive theories of music and discussions of expressive qualities in nature, Brady examines the distinctive character and basis of these qualities in sentient non-human creatures. She then address potential moral problems and objections, in particular, how aesthetic appreciation of expressive qualities is related to or distinct from sentimental, trivial, and anthropomorphic responses to wild animals.
Kafka’s Teeth
Authors: Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s entire section on Kafka (chapters 1-4), in which it is shown that Kafka’s work follows a discernible trajectory from third person narratives governed by dramatic judgment scenes toward stories structured more my ruminating first person voices contending with indefinite anxiety. The arc of this trajectory is one in which the residual sublimity embodied again and again by the judges in Kafka’s judgment narratives is emptied and “destituted.” Beginning with readings of the early letters to Oskar Pollak, and moving on to detailed analyses of the early Diary entries that preceded the composition of “The Judgment,” this chapter shows how the scenario of judgment before a powerful sublime instance is established as the schema of Kafka’s literary striving, which leads directly to the figural and thematic shape of Kafka’s first mature fiction. The image of “two milk teeth” contained in a locked box, mentioned in a letter to Pollak, provides a guiding motif in an analysis that links judgment to the Gewissensbiss or “bite of conscience” in Kafka’s early literary scenographies. A conscience bitten and wounded by projected judgments is shown to be a fundamental configuration of Kafka’s writing during this period.
Beckett’s Voices and the Paradox of Expression
Authors: Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

This chapter analyzes a fundamental paradox that cuts across Beckett’s corpus, in which the impossibility of expression is doubled by the equally insistent inevitability of expression. Both sides of this paradox are laid out in reference to texts in which the first person voice, while progressively attenuated and stripped of every narrative resource, nonetheless continues to speak in a language from which it cannot eliminate a singular past, its own having been. In readings of Beckett’s postwar novels (Mercier and Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), against the background of the manifesto type statements in “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” it is shown that the obtrusive insistence of this singular past constitutes its own pointed but empty imperative to speak, one that continually shades into sheer compulsion. The lyricism of these texts reveals a stubborn melancholy attachment to past time, indeed a deep sentimentality, that is undermined, but not dissolved, by Beckett’s irony, and by formal procedures such as the use of pronouns (as discussed by Emile Benveniste). The narrative voice, in its lyricism and derision, is the tortured locus of these incompatible but ineliminable structural tendencies.
“Not Bound by Enclosure”
Authors: Fraser Connolly Mary Beth
Published: September 2014

Chapter two examines how the Sisters of Mercy lived their religion and sought to incorporate their founding charism in their works of mercy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sisters of Mercy, as defined by Catherine McAuley, were not constrained by the religious rule of cloister or enclosure, and consequently went out into the world in ways that other women religious, both Catholic and Protestant, could not. As the Mercys spread throughout Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, performing similar but not identical ministries, they built a network of parish schools, academies, hospitals, homes for women, orphanages, and other ministries that sprung from a common foundress, spirit, and purpose. By the early twentieth century, Mercys from Chicago South, Chicago West, Aurora, Ottawa, Milwaukee, Janesville, Davenport, and Iowa City, faced with changes to religious life directed by the Vatican and conscious of the needs of their local foundations and communities, discussed consolidating the disparate locations into one Province.
Thinking Through the Imagination
Authors: Kaag John
Published: September 2014

In this book, John Kaag explores the following questions: What is the imagination? And where does the imagination come from? In order to answer these questions, Kaag explains the way that the concept of the imagination has been articulated in the history of Western philosophy, concentrating on its development in 18th century German idealism (primarily in the writings of Kant and Schiller) and in 19th century American pragmatism (embodied in the writings of C.S. Peirce). Kaag's historical approach to the imagination reveals important affinities between German idealism and the philosophy of C.S. Peirce. The primary goal of this intellectual history, however, is to reveal crucial point concerning the definition and the origins of the imagination and human creativity. The imagination should not be regarded as a narrow aesthetic faculty, but rather as a process that plays a vital role in human cognition and meaning-making. The imagination has long been regarded as belonging to artists and poets, but what Kaag's account suggests is that this artistic process emerges from natural processes, making sense of Kant's very bold claim that human genius is a “gift of nature.” Kant, Schiller and Peirce—with increasing specificity—argue that the dynamics of nature are in some way continuous with the creativity of human thinking and doing. This position regarding the “nature of the imagination” encourages Kaag to reconsider the unique form of idealism that emerges in post-Kantian thought (an idealism like Peirce's that takes seriously the findings of the empirical sciences). In the final sections of the book, Kaag turns to contemporary cognitive neuroscience to see if this emerging discipline can help chart the way of the imagination.
Enlightening Thought
Authors: Kaag John
Published: September 2014

In the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant is one of the first modern thinkers to take the imagination seriously. This chapter outlines Kant's development of the concept in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Aesthetic judgment. Kaag highlights the difference between the two treatments of the imagination (in its reproductive, productive and creative capacities). In line with many Kant scholars, Kaag suggests that many of the conclusions presented in the third Critique address questions about human knowing and human feeling expressed in the first and second Critiques. In his analysis of Kant, Kaag focuses on the way that aesthetic common sense and genius are developed in the Critique of Aesthetic judgment, paying particular attention to Kant's claim that genius is an ingenium (a gift of nature). Here, Kant is suggesting a point of continuity between human culture and nature, a point that will be vitally important to post-Kantian philosophers, especially C.S. Peirce.
C. S. Peirce and the Growth of the Imagination
Authors: Kaag John
Published: September 2014

This chapter explores the way that Kant's aesthetic theory, especially his understanding of imagination, genius and common sense, was imported into the philosophy of C.S. Peirce. Here, Peirce employs insights from Kant's aesthetics to place epistemology on a new footing that emphasizes the creative character of human cognition. Kaag highlights Peirce's early writings from 1868: “On a New List of Categories,” “Questions Concerning Faculties Claimed of Man,” and “Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities” and argues that these extend important Kantian themes.
Abduction
Authors: Kaag John
Published: September 2014

This chapter focuses the relationship between Peircean abduction and the concepts of the imagination and genius in German idealism. It asks the following questions: What is abduction? Can abduction be formalized? How has abduction been described in the secondary literature? In light of this formalization and these more recent descriptions, what standards might be used to judge the verity and value of particular abductive processes? Most importantly for the purposes of the current project, to what extent does abductive logic coincide with the process of the imagination as described by Kant and Schiller? This last question is addressed in detail in the next chapter on musement and genius. But all these considerations shed light on Peirce's corpus and more generally on the nature of human cognition. In this respect, Jaakko Hintikka suggests that the questions concerning abduction stand as “the fundamental problem of contemporary epistemology.”
The Evolution of the Imagination
Authors: Kaag John
Published: September 2014

This chapter makes the turn toward cognitive neuroscience and contemporary studies of embodiment, specifically asking whether this disciplines are equipped to conduct the empirical studies of the imagination. Kaag focuses on the work of Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Gerald Edelman, and Donald Tucker in order to make two related claims: 1) that Johnson's work on metaphor suggests that human cognition reflects the plasticity and embodied character that has historically been reserved for describing the nature of the imagination and 2) that Edelman's work on neural Darwinism begins to explain the biologica underpinnings of Johnson's theory of metaphor.
Mourning Philology
Authors: Nichanian Marc
Published: September 2014

Mourning Philology proposes a history of the 19th century national imagination as a reaction to the two main philological inventions of that century: “mythological religion” and the “native.” This history is illustrated with the case of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The book offers an account of the successive stages (archeological, self-ethnographic, and aesthetical) of the implementation of orientalist philology, through which the nation came to existence. The last episode takes place in 1914 (a year before the general deportation and extermination of the Armenians of the Ottoman empire), in Constantinople, around Daniel Varuzhan, the proponent of “paganism” in Armenian poetry, who had devoted a large part of his work to the “mourning” for the dead gods, i.e. for the same mythological gods that had been given a new meaning by the philologists of the 19th century. The thesis behind this description is that the emergence of the nation is not primarily a political phenomenon. What is called here “aesthetic nationalism” has not been sufficiently taken into consideration by recent theories of nationalism.
Mourning Philology is also part of a general reflection on the nature of the Catastrophe and the way it destroys the possibility of mourning. From the German philosopher Schelling to the Armenian poet Varuzhan, art was understood as a power of mourning for the death of mythological religion. Is this “art as mourning” capable of measuring up to the catastrophic event? This is the guiding question of the book. An appendix offers an English translation of all the Armenian texts mentioned or analyzed in the main text.
The Disaster of the Native
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

This chapter introduces the reader to the poetical work of Daniel Varuzhan and offers a new account of the invention of the native. It shows how the poet reclaimed “poetic paganism” as a motto for his work, and how this work aims at the restoration of the native. The native is a fallen witness and a living ruin. The main object of this chapter is the description of the “aesthetic principle,” which both explained this “disaster” of the native and was supposed to overcome it through the aestheticization of the popular sources. The aesthetic principle was thus a way of bringing the disaster to language. The chapter discusses the connection (or absence thereof) between the disaster presupposed by philology (and inherent in the native) and the historical catastrophe that befell the Armenians of the Ottoman empire. Daniel Varuzhan is read as one of these “writers of disaster” who tried to cope with the catastrophe.
Complex Negation, Necessity, and Logical Magic
Authors: Auxier Randall E.
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the ground and function of Royce conception of necessity. I show that Royce's idea of necessity is negative, as are all universals for Royce. I explain how the various sense of “negation” in Royce's philosophy can be employed to demonstrate his sense of the Absolute which, far from being the abstract determiner of all truth, for Royce, is actually the conclusion to which we are compelled by the fact of our finitude. In the end, the surprising results of the formal analysis of “Some s is not p,” as “Some experience is not mine,” yields a magical result: not only is solipsism refuted, but the Absolute is as close to being “proven” as any Absolute could ever be.
Racism, Race, and Josiah Royce
Authors: Kegley Jacquelyn Ann K.
Published: September 2014

Royce's 1908 essay, “Race Questions and Prejudices” has been the subject of various interpretations and some controversy. This piece addresses some of the criticisms, focusing on the following questions: (1) Is he really attacking the scientific racism in his time? (2) Is his discussion of Japan in his article a reflection of racial views in his time? (3) Does his use of the case studies of Jamaica and Trinidad in his “Race Questions” and his relationship to Sir Sydney Olivier demonstrate that he is a “white imperialist? (4) Does his discussion of “assimilation” in the “Race Questions” essay and other works indicate that he is a white supremacist? and (5) what is his understanding of the phrase “antipathies?” I also offer some reflections on the complexities of dealing philosophically with “race questions.”
A Case of Mistaken Identity
Authors: Grisard Dominique
Published: September 2014

Going back to Russian women’s involvement in radical anarchist circles in late 19th and early 20th century Europe, the chapter asks about their impact on Swiss politics and everyday life. At the time the masculine self-stylizing of Russian anarchist women questioned European notions of gender and sexuality . Focusing on the case of Tatiana Leontieva, an unassuming Russian medical student turned assassin, the chapter argues that Leontieva’s undercover ‘drag’ performance and decidedly feminine self-presentation managed to ‘queer’ bourgeois identity and identification politics in subtle and more obvious ways. The unsettling effect female Russian anarchists had on European notions of gender, sexuality and identity contributed to a symbolic and political “fortification” of Europe against Russia. Looking back at the interventions of queer Russian anarchists in early twentieth-century Western Europe enables us to historically rethink the meaning of European border policing now, in a post-9/11 security era.
What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille , and French Cuisine?
Authors: Murat Laure
Published: September 2014

This chapter focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of questions to this American reading of “old France” and its stereotypical symbols: is the French kitchen a metaphor of the “melting pot” where immigrants elaborate recipes whose basic principle is precisely to “mix” ingredients? Is the motto “anyone can cook” the culinary equivalent of French universalism, assuming that anyone can become French if they simply adopt French culture as their own?
Giving Beyond the Gift
Authors: Wolfson Elliot R.
Published: September 2014

The book explores the codependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, in differing degrees, they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Jacques Derrida and Edith Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence challenges recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis, such that the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift would give way to the more neutral notion of an unconditional givenness that allows the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.
Apophatic Vision and Overcoming the Dialogical
Authors: Wolfson Elliot R.
Published: September 2014

It is commonly maintained that Rosenzweig's new thinking rests upon the supposition that there are three unsublatable elements—God, human, and world—that emerge from the shattering of the all-encompassing totality presumed by German idealists to be the ultimate reality. This chapter reassesses depiction Rosenzweig's thought by examining the appropriation of negative theology at the end of the path. The All is retrieved, but not as the one, all-encompassing nothing, but as a threefold nothing, a nothing aligned individually with each of the basic terms of Rosenzweig's correlative thinking—the nothing of the knowledge of the human or the metaethical, the nothing of the knowledge of the world or the metalogical, and the nothing of the knowledge of God or the metaphysical. The apophatic vision is an other-worldly state, the “eternal bliss” of the life-beyond-death, not a triumph of death by a return to the vicissitudes of temporal existence but rather an overcoming of time in the fullness of time. Redemption at the end restores one to creation at the beginning, and the hiddenness of the primordial world, which became manifest in the renewed world of revelation, becomes hidden again in the eternal supra-world. The effort of the Star, in great measure, is to reveal this concealment as the revelation that is concealment. The price to be paid for grounding the openness to the other in a negative theology is the potential undoing of the dialogical in the discernment that what is disclosed is the face of truth that cannot be rendered literally but only metaphorically. The metaphysical concept of actual presence is transposed thereby into a semiotic trope of mythopoetic metaphoricization. The figurative status of the configuration of the divine face beheld in the star puts into play the possibility that the ultimate truth is that there is no truth, just as knowledge of the essence consists of becoming cognizant of the fact that there is no essence to be known. In spite of Rosenzweig's painstaking effort to espouse that the personal God of Judaism cannot be “only an allegory,” that revelation must consist of the unmediated bond between God and human that rests on the unique self-disclosure of the former to the latter and the consequent courage of the latter to bow down in worship before the former, it is not clear that theistic language for him is anything but metaphorical, as there is no reality but the naught that is not-nothing, the nothing that is not, not even nothing.
The Law of the Household: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Iranian Revolution
Authors: Cooper Melinda
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Cooper argues that Foucault’s engagement with the early phases of the Iranian Revolution sheds a great deal of light on his understanding of neoliberalism as a new normative order of the household (oiko-nomia). On Cooper’s reading, Foucault’s fascination with the ideology of the Iranian Revolution betrays his intention to recover the “ancient” understanding of the nomos of the household in order to offset Becker’s neoliberal “new household economics” that threatens to destroy all sexual discipline, all substantive sexual normative order, by turning every individual into the entrepreneur of his or her own body and sexuality.
The Embodiment of Truth and the Politics of Community: Foucault and the Cynics
Authors: Lemm Vanessa
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Lemm analyzes Foucault’s return to the Socratic practice of philosophy by focusing on the most extreme of the Socratic schools, namely, the Cynics. Lemm reads into Foucault’s fascination with the Cynics the traces left in his thinking by Nietzsche’s problem of how much truth can be incorporated or embodied in a life. Cynic philosophy, for Lemm, presents itself as the most radical reduction of bios to zoe in order to unleash both the immunitary and the communitary resources of embodiment. According to Lemm, Foucault saw in the Cynic form of life an experiment to unite life (zoe) and philosophy so as to make possible a form of life (bios) that resists the very idea of a government of life.
Visibly Fashionable
Authors: Caratozzolo Vittoria Caterina
Published: September 2014

The chapter investigates the impact of dress-code changes upon early Southern Italian immigrant women in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. Its aim is to point out the twists and turns that marked the lives of these women during their passage from an artisanal mode of production, revolving around the family unit, into an industrial consumerist environment set in an urban culture. The “change of clothes” terrain was heavily contested, sparking class, gender, and generation struggles within families and communities, locally and transnationally, but the change itself was largely understood as a necessary prerequisite to participate in the host society’s competitive labor market and larger public culture, without necessarily relinquishing or masking one’s own ethno-racial affiliation. In fact, the chapter questions the stereotypical dichotomy between tradition and fashion and proposes, instead, an interpretation that blurs the boundary between these two semantic poles of clothing and offers a deeper understanding of migration phenomena as a theoretical issue, also relevant to the contemporary debate on these topics.
Radical Visions and Consumption
Authors: Bencivenni Marcella
Published: September 2014

The chapter identifies the arguments early-twentieth-century Italian socialists and anarchists in the United States elaborated transnationally about the challenges and opportunities the labor movement was presented with in the face of capitalist material abundance and shortcomings in its egalitarian distribution. Italian radicals tried to accommodate in original ways their critique of American consumerism with their efforts at offering organized moments of leisure and material enjoyment for militants and sympathizers. Political picnics, and other leisure activities and cultural institutions that the essay discusses, were part of a distinctive “movement culture” that helped shape, sustain, and spread an alternative lifestyle within the Little Italies. They were key occasions for political propaganda and fundraising, but they also became “forms of consumption that gave a sense of collective life” to Italian immigrants, reinforcing their working-class and ethnic identity.
The Double Life of the Italian Suit
Authors: Ritter Courtney
Published: September 2014

Since the 1980s, the arrival of new appealing, high-scale “made in Italy” goods and images, which are expressions of a globally popular “Italian Way of Life,” have complicated Italian American “identity shopping.” The chapter focuses on the fortunes of Italian men’s fashion in the U.S. market, by connecting the production side, based in Third Italy (the industrial districts made of networks of small firms and workshops in northern and central Italy), and the consumer side—notably, the embodiment of a reconfigured Italian American identity into designer men’s suits. The flexible and instable Italian identities produced through the influence of the 1980s and 1990s “Made in Italy” label has made Italian Americans a rife location for exploring role of class, ethnicity and consumption in contemporary culture—notions which have become all the more electrified in the current economic climate of recession and crisis of consumerism.
Rhetorical Turns in Ancient Greece
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes the meaning and implications of each of the rhetorical turns in Greece. Specifically, it discusses the first rhetorical turn, or how philosophy tamed logos; and the second type of rhetorical turn, or rhetoric as a social bind.
The Relativity of Translation and Relativism
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter takes as its starting point a Greek sentence by the one whom Plato called “father Parmenides.” It shows that this sentence is the product of a series of interpretive operations whose ultimate achievement is, and is nothing but, translation. The most appropriate name for this series of operations is fixion, spelled with the Lacanian x in order to emphasize, through Bentham and Nietzsche, that the fact is a fabrication, the factum is a fictum one decides to fix. It is shown that translation—in this case, the translation of this sentence by Parmenides—regularly violates the principle of noncontradiction to a degree that it must account for ambiguities and homonymies. This violation, according to Aristotle himself, amounts to a return to Protagoras' position, that is, to what we call “relativism”.
Discussion Between Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy (2004)
Authors: Derrida Jacques
Published: September 2014

This chapter is the transcription of a discussion between Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe from June 2004 during Derrida's visit—his final visit—to Strasbourg. The discussion begins with questions concerning Heidegger and his politics before turning to more general questions about community and generation, and, most poignantly, about death, finitude, mourning, survival, and immortality. We thus hear Derrida, four months before his death, conversing with Strasbourg's two most famous philosophers about the all-too-relevant and pressing questions of legacy, the archive, the afterlife, and immortality.
This Catholic Mom
Authors: Word Deb
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents the story of Deb Word, a mother of two sons who opened her family home to more than a dozen LGBTQ youths who had been abandoned by their families of origin. She describes the new perspective on family and faith that she gained not only through her interactions with the teenagers and young adults but also through her relationship with one of her own sons, who struggled for years with Catholic teachings before coming out as a gay man. She describes the efforts that she and other Catholic parents of LGBTQ children took to draw the attention of church leaders and communities to the experiences, identities, and humanity of their loved ones. She identifies the ways in which experiences of love in sexual diversity often lead people to firmer understandings of themselves, their families, and their intimate relationships.
A Delicate Dance
Authors: Delgado Teresa
Published: September 2014

In this chapter, a professor of Christian ethics at a Roman Catholic liberal arts college describes the ways in which her campus community responded to a transgender colleague who had undergone genital reassignment surgery and to a group of students who had advocated for a public event on safer sex practices. Both situations represented opportunities for participants to engage in the “subtle, complex, and poignant interpersonal, institutional, and moral ‘dance’” that characterizes discussions of LGBTQ concerns in Catholic institutions of higher education. Naming this dance prompts a discussion of a series of questions about heterosexual privilege, conscience, institutional identity, and her own identity as a Catholic, heterosexual, feminist scholar.
Do Not Quench the Spirit
Authors: Falcone John P.
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes “Rainbow Ministry” and “Queer Ritual Practice,” two sets of practices that have marked the author’s career in Catholic secondary education and social justice ministry, his present role as a doctoral student in a Catholic theological institution, and his personal relationship with Catholicism. Drawing upon his experiences as a student leader and upon his partner’s practice of wearing a rainbow pin to Catholic liturgies, the author highlights the ways in which these and kindred practices create space for what he names the work of the Holy Spirit.
“Church, Heal Thyself”
Authors: Clark Mark Andrew
Published: September 2014

In this chapter, the author reflects on the love of God, the lively sacramental sensibilities, and the profound values that the church nurtured in him. Animated by love for God and desiring to serve, he entered minor seminary as a college student. But when, after falling in love, he confronted his gay identity, he found himself unmoored, disoriented, and virtually abandoned by the church he had so loved. Today, as a physician and medical school professor, he cherishes his Catholic faith and has found a welcoming parish community. But he struggles with, laments, and questions the disjuncture between what his scientific training and faithful life experience have taught him about being a gay man in relation to God and neighbor, and the present state of church teaching on these matters.
Afterword
Authors: Beaudoin Tom , Hinze Bradford E.
Published: September 2014

This volume was designed to provide an opportunity for a reading audience to listen to a variety of personal testimonies on the subject of sexual diversity, in the interest of promoting more open discussion in the church and, by extension, in the wider society. This effort is consistent with the promotion of a dialogical, or what is technically described as synodal or conciliar, view of the church, one based on the belief that all the faithful have a role to play in collaborating with bishops and priests in the teaching mission of the church, a view advanced at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This chapter first treats these personal testimonies from the perspective of ecclesiology, the scholarly study of the church. It then considers these same contributions in light of the emerging field of practical theology, which focuses on the theological meanings of practice and experience in church and society.