bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Convents And Conflict: Conventual Urbanism In Naples
Authors: Hills Helen
Published: November 2023

Convents were never far from conflict. A conspicuous presence in the city, the crucible of power relations, was vital for religious orders and aristocratic families. Rivalries spiraled as convents competed to crown the city sky line, dominate prominent sites, and occupy prestigious road frontages (Plate 7). Convents fought for power urbanistically, not only through aggrandizement in spatial terms, but also through architectural design. In Rome power struggles were fought urbanistically at a local level, as families struggled to make their palace jut farther out at a critical corner than the palace next door, command a view, or dominate a vista through densely packed streets.1 In Naples similar struggles occurred between female convents, determined to occupy impressive street frontages, or to dominate a prominent part of the city, or its skyline. Conspicuousness within the urban fabric consolidated political power. Disputes between convents often focused on optical power, what could be seen, and who could overlook whom and from where. These struggles to assume dominance in terms of sight were constant within early modern Italian cities and were not restricted to convents. But because enclosed religious orders enjoyed few other avenues for expression and exploration, the right to determine what inmates could see and who could see them became particularly significant.
Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values
Authors: Goodman Lenn E
Published: November 2023

In this important addition to the field of Jewish ethics, Goodman argues forcefully that the Jewish tradition has a significant contribution to make to the general discourse on ethical issues. After refuting the notion that “human rights” is a purely modern notion, Goodman traces the idea of such rights to its key biblical sources. He goes on to consider the works of medieval thinkers like Saadiah Goan and Moses Maimonides and then applies these and other foundational texts to such contemporary social and political issues as capital punishment, suicide, welfare, pornography, abortion, and nationalism.
The Harmonic Crystal
Authors: Girifalco Louis A
Published: November 2023

The atoms in a monatomic crystal continually vibrate around their mean positions, and it is these vibrations that give the crystal its thermal energy. A rigorous quantum theory of the crystal should include the dynamics of all the electrons and the nuclei explicitly. However, the electrons are much lighter than the nuclei and therefore have a much faster reaction time to any disturbance. That is, if a nucleus is given a small displacement, the electrons will readjust their positions in response to the forces between the nucleus and the electrons in a very short time. This is the basis for the adiabatic approximation, which states that the readjustment time is so short compared to the period of vibration of the nuclei that it can be taken as zero. This means that the electrons are in a state that is determined by the instantaneous position of the nuclei.
Magnetic Order
Authors: Girifalco Louis A
Published: November 2023

There is always a diamagnetic response. In this case, the applied magnetic field induces currents in the electron systems of the atoms with an associated magnetic field that opposes the external field. The induced magnetic moments in a diamagnetic material therefore are in the opposite direction of the applied field, and the diamagnetic susceptibility is negative. The diamagnetic effect is small and essentially independent of temperature and will not be treated here.
Introductory
Authors: Chai Leon
Published: November 2023

We Might Begin with the sort of scene Descartes describes in the first of his Meditations: himself, seated in a dressing gown by a fire, holding a sheet of paper in his hand, wondering about the reality of that paper, his body, perhaps ultimately himself. It is tempting to see this scene as representative, in many ways, of what philosophy in his time is all about. To begin with, there is the emphasis on ordinary, everyday situations. Secondly, there is the effort to resolve questions that arise from reflection on such situations without having recourse to unwarranted assumptions or concepts that do not derive directly from the situation itself. Instead, we find each question pursued to its natural outcome through a method based on deductions and inferences. Finally, there is a concern with the ultimate purpose of such questions, a desire to ascertain whether they are in fact genuinely meaningful.
A Consolation to His Wife
Authors: Russell Donald
Published: November 2023

The messenger you sent to tell me of the child’s death must have missed me on his way to Athens; I only heard of it from my niece when I got to Tanagra. I imagine the funeral is now over, and hope it has been done in the way that will make for least pain for you both now and in the future. If there is anything you wished to do but refrained from doing, waiting for my decision, but which you think will make things easier to bear, pray do it, without extravagance or superstition, for which I know you have no inclination. Only, my dear wife, at this sad moment, keep yourself, and me, calm. I know I can get the measure of what has happened; but if I see you grieving to excess, that will hurt me more than the loss. But I am no “child of oak or rock”: you know that, you have shared with me the upbringing of all our children, all reared at home by ourselves, and you know that this child was beloved by me above all, because she was the daughter you wanted after four sons and she gave me the opportunity to give her your name.
Plutarch’s Moral Program
Authors: Swain Simon
Published: November 2023

Plutarch was born about A.D. 40-45 and lived at Chaeronea in Boeotia till his death about 120, shortly after the accession of the emperor Hadrian. He was a true aristocrat. His or his wife’s family traced their ancestry to the ancient heroes of Boeotia and Phocis and felt “entitled to a greater share than others in Boeotia” because of it (God’s Slowness to Punish 558A). When he was about 50 he became one of the priests of Apollo at Delphi, a role which accords with his commitment to public service and his firm belief in the traditional religion of the Greeks. It was apparently around this time that he began his career as a prolific author. By the end of his life his fame was well established. The story is told that his younger acquaintance Favorinus vainly “tried to rival the infinity of his collected works.” An indication of the number and range of these writings is provided by the catalogue of an unknown ancient library called the “Lamprias Catalogue.” This lists 227 items (a few of these being misdivided, misshelved, or wrongly attributed works).
Gendering Virtue
Authors: Mcnamara Jo Ann
Published: November 2023

In Plato’s day, men could sit at dinner talking about themselves while they reduced women to a rhetorical device. Philosophers perceived that nature endowed everyone with some measure of virtue (manliness). They amused themselves with the abstract possibility that a few women might excel the majority of men and therefore qualify as rulers in an ideal republic. Individuals ranged along a single gender continuum from most manly to wholly effeminate. Thus most men and practically all women, lacking self-discipline and training, were doomed to subservience. When the sons of the privileged spoke only to one another, it was easy to define women as imperfect or deformed men, confirming their smug conviction that they normally sank to the lower end of the scale, unable to govern themselves without the support and guidance of their natural superiors. In that classical golden age, a good woman was never even named in public. An ideal woman was something for men to think with.
Plutarch on Persuasion
Authors: Stafford Emma J
Published: November 2023

The ancients set Hermes at Aphrodite’s side, knowing that the pleasure of marriage needed his word more than anything, and with them they set Persuasion and the Graces, that married couples might gratify their desire with each other by persuasion, not in conflict or quarrelsomeness. In the opening paragraph of the Advice, Plutarch adduces the religious practice of “the ancients” in support of the proposition that harmony in marriage should be sought by means of mutual persuasion. In the immediate context of the quote this “persuasion” seems to be of an erotic variety, since its goal is gratification of desire, but such a preference for persuasion over confrontation in general is a feature of the essay. Plutarch’s advice on the subject is drawing on a long tradition of the “persuasion (peitho) against force (bia)” argument, a commonplace of classical rhetoric. His application of such ideas to the context of marriage, however, is informed by a further set of traditional associations which emphasize persuasion’s erotic side: Peitho, persuasion personified, was worshipped alongside Aphrodite and may have had a part to play in classical Greek wedding ritual.
Prelude
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

“The music-it’s beautiful,” Mr. Veil says. His slight hesitation is betrayed by the popping of tiny air sacs along his forelimbs. Perhaps he feels you are about to send him on a dangerous expedition.
Building an Einstein-Langevin Clock
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

Constantia draws her fingers through her hair, which cascades over a cloak of tawny orange suede. She is a slim woman, in her mid-twenties, with honey-colored hair and eyes of luminous jade. As she walks forward, her plastic/platinum hybrid boots make a tiny clicking noise on the floor. “Mr. Veil, don’t worry; I’m here to learn, just like you. Maybe someday I can go back in time and visit with Peter the Great, the most outstanding of the Russian czars.” She gives his forelimb a squeeze and looks at him with a charming smile that involves her eyes as well as her mouth. The Zetamorph walks away with his rump tightly coiled against his body. He stands and squints at you.
The Brain’s Time Machine
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

You shake your head. “Mr. Veil, it must be a coincidence.” You pause. “And why do you think she’s a robot?” “I saw her insert a screwdriver into her right ear to make certain adjustments.” Constantia walks into the room. On her shirt are several large, blue-and-yellow triangles. Her shirt’s button’s are shaped like spirals, and her earrings, light-emitting diodes, are blinking. “Hey, you guys whispering about me again?” The triangles on her shirt seem to vibrate. “Mr. Veil has some crazy idea that you’re from the 1800s, that you knew Chopin.” “What?” Mr. Veil towers above Constantia. “Madame, your name-it’s the same as one of Chopin’s loves.” “Oh, all this whispering is about that?” She smiles. “I come from a musical family. They loved Chopin. They named me after Chopin’s girlfriend. They liked the name. Nothing strange about that.” You turn to Mr. Veil.
Gravitational Time Dilation
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

“Mr. Veil, his watch was probably in perfect working order. Gravity causes time to slow down. Far away from the black hole, where space time is flat, clocks tick at their normal rates. Imagine you are on a ship watching your friend as he went closer to the black hole. You would see his movements slow down.
Personal Communities
Authors: Nock Steven L
Published: November 2023

The personal connections that link individuals define our society and integrate each of us into a social world made up of networks of others. We are likely known by the company we keep; certainly that is how we come to know ourselves. In others’ reflected appraisal we see ourselves.
The Official Birth of Physics
Authors: Klein Étienne , Lachièze-Rey Marc
Published: November 2023

It is often said that physics came of age during the seventeenth century with such leading figures as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The previous chapter has already underscored this illustrious lineage. But it would be a gross oversight to ignore their many predecessors, whose own reflections exerted a strong influence from Greek antiquity to the Middle Ages. The transition from the ancient conceptions of nature, outlined at the beginning of this book, to a nascent science was a slow and laborious process, covering many pages in the history of ideas. Among the numerous shapers of the modem age, besides the Greek thinkers and mathematicians, are Thomas Aquinas ( 1228-1274), also known as St. Thomas, and Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). We start with Thomas Aquinas because, until the Middle Ages, reason was entirely subordinated to faith, the nature of grace, philosophy, and theology. The world, tainted by original sin, was effectively despised and considered contingent. After rereading Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas contributed to the birth of a philosophy distinct from theology, indeed relatively autonomous from it.
Modern Unifications
Authors: Klein Étienne , Lachièze-Rey Marc
Published: November 2023

Quantum theory was invented to enable physicists to account for phenomena taking place on microscopic scales. These phenomena may involve either atoms or particles such as protons, neutrons, electrons, or even photons, which are discrete units of light. None of these objects can be seen with the naked eye, a magnifying glass, or even a microscope. They were not discovered until the twentieth century. From about 1920 to the present, quantum physics has been the discipline of choice to advance virtually every area of science, from solid state physics to nuclear and particle physics. It came into existence after physicists began to realize early in this century that the traditional laws of physics were unable to explain the behavior of atoms. In particular, classical physics could not account for the stability of atoms, nor for the mechanism by which these atoms can emit light. Electrons too seemed to have peculiar properties. Although they were supposed to circle around the atomic nucleus somewhat like planets around the sun, they did not appear to have well-defined orbits. In most cases, it looked instead as though they were smeared out in space.
Dreams of Unity at the Close of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Klein Étienne , Lachièze-Rey Marc
Published: November 2023

As we have mentioned, doctrines of things taken as a whole found a natural fit in monistic philosophies. Among them, we must make a distinction between those that hold that totality just is and those that promote unity through the bias of a transcendent principle. The universe is one by essence, believed a number of pre-Socratic philosophers. Those who agree with them that totality derives its unity and existence from itself will be inclined to make light of what internal multiplicity it may contain. Extremists might even argue that such multiplicity can only be rationalized as an incidental and temporary attribute. That, however, is not the point of view of modem physics, which considers that the unity of the universe stems from the laws that govern it. The physical order physicists talk about these days rings with a jurisdictive overtone: “Nature does not break its own laws,” exclaimed Leonardo da Vinci, adding: “It is constrained by the rationality of its law, which is infused and lives in it.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin, a distinguished scientist, professed to feel sorry for future physicists.
A New Mount Vernon, 1758-1773
Authors: Dalzell Robert F , Dalzell Lee Baldwin
Published: November 2023

Almost three months after their wedding, George Washington was finally bringing his bride home to Mount Vernon, and his anxiety was clear in the hastily penned instructions he rushed on ahead to John Alton, one of his workers. Equally clear was the fact that while the house may have been habitable, it was not much more than that. The furniture was still being kept wherever it had been stored during the long months of construction, and apparently there had been no time to give the place a proper cleaning, or so Washington feared. One imagines scraps of wood, sawhorses, paint pots, bits of wallpaper, and plaster dust everywhere.
Slaves and Overseers
Authors: Dalzell Robert F , Dalzell Lee Baldwin
Published: November 2023

In short, when Washington was there to check on them, his slave carpenters worked at four times the speed they did when he was not there. Or so he concluded.
Artisans
Authors: Dalzell Robert F , Dalzell Lee Baldwin
Published: November 2023

In all of Washington’s building projects, slaves and their overseers played a vital role, but some of the changes he made at Mount Vernon called for skills they did not possess. Isaac in his shop crafted wheels and plows, and the outside carpenters built kitchens, washhouses, and barns, but for a finely carved chimneypiece in the dining room of the main house, or ceilings decorated with ornamental plasterwork, or properly cultivated specimens of rare plants, Washington did what other planter-builders did: he brought in artisans with specialized training. Some were indentured servants working to pay off the cost of their passage to America; others were independent members of fledgling artisan communities precariously planted in the New World. But whatever their circumstances, finding qualified artisans was no easy matter in Virginia, and managing their work could turn out to be every bit as difficult as managing the labor of slaves and overseers.
Undertakers And Managers
Authors: Dalzell Robert F , Dalzell Lee Baldwin
Published: November 2023

At the top of the hierarchy of Mount Vernon’s builders stood the undertakers and managers. The equivalent of modern-day contractors, undertakers were figures of consequence in Virginia, who in addition to plying their own trades, assumed responsibility for organizing and supervising entire projects. If Mount Vernon had been built of brick, its undertakers would have been masons; as it was, Washington hired house carpenters. Each of them came with small crews of their own, but they were also at liberty to draw on the plantation’s labor force if necessary.
At Home and Away, 1788-1799
Authors: Dalzell Robert F , Dalzell Lee Baldwin
Published: November 2023

In february 1787, in the midst of considering whether to attend the constitutional convention called for later that year in Philadelphia, Washington wrote his mother a longish letter about her future. Relations between the two had never been smooth. Mary Washington continued to live in Fredericksburg but managed her affairs badly and now was suffering from cancer. Over the years Washington had done what he could, often with thinly veiled impatience, to help keep her domestic establishment afloat.
To Give and Bequeath
Authors: Dalzell Robert F , Dalzell Lee Baldwin
Published: November 2023

The last year of George Washington’s life, like so many others at Mount Vernon, mixed the commonplace liberally with the momentous. Typical of the former was Parson Latta’s visit. On July 3, 1799, without warning and describing himself simply “as a young clergyman from Pennsylvania traveling to see the country,” he made his way up the drive hoping to see the Washingtons’ “improvements.”
Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Apocalypse
Authors: O’leary Stephen D
Published: November 2023

In recent years, popular interest in biblical prophecies of Armageddon has been a highly visible (and sometimes controversial) trend. Fascination with apocalyptic predictions, whether from the Bible, from new interpretations of the writings of ancient seers, or from New Age “channelers,” seems likely to increase dramatically as the turn of the millennium draws nearer. The purpose of this study is to offer a theoretical framework for understanding the millenarian and apocalyptic discourse that will inevitably be generated as we approach and move beyond the two thou sandth year of the Christian era. My foundational assumption is that the discourses of apocalypticism and millennialism can usefully be viewed as rhetoric.
Millerism as a Rhetorical Movement
Authors: O’leary Stephen D
Published: November 2023

In the decades following the War of 1812, the American Zeitgeist seemed to be borne upon a wave of optimism. These were years that saw the Jacksonian revolution, the so-called “Era of Good Feeling,” the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, and a host of reform movements that sought a variety of social, political, and religious ends. During this period, many revivalist preachers departed radically from the bleak Puritan vision of humanity’s innate sinfulness and inability to work toward its own salvation, and adopted a conception of human progress that was both rationalist and perfectionist. In his classic study The Kingdom of God in America, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr associates the preaching of the first and second Great Awakenings with the prevailing Enlightenment conceptions of rationality, and argues that the dominant theme among these evangelists was “the insistence that the reign of Christ was above all a rule of knowledge in the minds of men.”
Introduction
Authors: Zuckerman Bruce
Published: November 2023

The point of departure for this study is, in essence, a simple question: Why do we think of the biblical Job as patient Job; indeed, why is this such a fixed concept in the popular consciousness that the “patience of Job” has been elevated to the level of a nearly universal cultural proverb, if not cliche? This question is easy to pose, but-as this study will endeavor to demonstrate-the answer is not so easily framed. In fact, in the course of trying to formulate an answer, one is naturally led to consider further questions about the book and tradition of Job that are equally challenging to answer, if not more so.
Inanna
Authors: Moon Beverly
Published: November 2023

The Sumerian goddess Inanna was worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, for more than 4,000 years. Although the origins of her cult lie in prehistory, between the arrival of the Sumerians ca. 3500 BCE and the transformation of the Near East under Islam in 637 CE this goddess, known as the Queen of Heaven, played a central role in the religious life of the many peoples who came to make this land their home. The Akkadians and Babylonians, who came to dominate the area after the Sumerians (ca. 2300 BCE), continued to worship her but called her Ishtar.
Politicians, Pastors, and Pimps: Christianity and Prostitution Policies
Authors: Brock Rita Nakashima
Published: November 2023

When Fortress Press published Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States, Marshall Johnson, director of the Lutheran Press, received several phone calls from pastors protesting a book on prostitution published by a religious press. Johnson’s reply: “One of the few things of which we can be fairly certain about Jesus is that he had a remarkably positive attitude toward prostitutes.” The editors at Fortress and those indignant clergy demonstrate the range of traditional Christian perspectives on prostitution, from sympathetic to righteously indignant.
Strange And Secret Peoples
Authors: Silver Carole G
Published: November 2023

Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era. Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.
Satī The Event and the Ideology
Authors: Bose Mandakranta
Published: November 2023

In September 1987, in a village in India’s northwestern province of Rajasthan, an eighteen-year-old woman, Roop Kanwar, died in the funeral pyre of her 24-year-old husband, apparently in an act of exemplary devotion to her husband and to a Hindu practice supposedly hallowed by creed and custom. The couple had been married for less than a year. A photograph of the funeral shows a smiling Roop, bedecked in her wedding outfit and holding on to her husband’s body as the flames rise around her. The picture was widely distributed all over Rajasthan to prove the triumphant survival of an ancient tradition-namely, the voluntary choice of self-immolation as the highest wifely duty, one that ensured for the wife the ultimate accolade of a sati, a wife wholly dedicated to her husband. The word sati means a woman who is virtuous and truthful and, as an extension of the term, a woman who is chaste and totally devoted to her husband. After Roop Kanwar’s death, which was witnessed by thousands of worshipful supporters, including large numbers of women chanting Roop’s praise, she was virtually deified by those who organized the event. It was, they claimed, an entirely voluntary act and one that reiterated the ancient values of Hindu society and rediscovered the power of spiritual and physical self-sacrifice that, in their view, is at the core of the Hindu religion and elevates it above all others. Soon, however, this view of noble self-sacrifice was questioned. Roop Kanwar was said to have been in a drugged state and the famous photograph a fake. The ecstatic smile the crowd saw on her dying face was suspected to be the rictus of death. Her death took place without the knowledge of her parents, who learned of it from newspaper reports. Her in-laws were found to be earning enormous sums from worshipers at a shrine erected to Roop on their property, where they had held the funeral instead of at the public cremation site. Most telling of all, local custom would have allowed the widowed Roop to return to her parents’ home with the very substantial dowry that she had brought as a bride.
Mīrābai in the Academy and the Politics of Identity
Authors: Bose Mandakranta
Published: November 2023

A fifteenth or sixteenth century rebellious woman poet-saint, who pursued her devotion to Kr i:ia with complete dedication, composed exceptionally beautiful songs of love and longing for God, and endured severe persecution because she did not behave as a member of the royal household should or because she crossed caste boundaries, seems a likely candidate for those who would look to the past for exemplary women of power and independence. Mīrābai is such a saint, but as soon as we begin to try to uncover the precise details of her life, we encounter multiple Mīrās. People have told her story in myriad ways, making her over in their own image and sometimes trying to appropriate her absolute devotion for their own purposes. l Her story of struggle and perseverance is compelling, but was she a good wife who turned to serious devotion only after her husband’s death, suffering unjustly at the hands of her in-laws, as some would have it, or was she a woman who knew her own mind and risked her life, disregarding hierarchies of gender, caste, and religion, in her shameless passion for God, as others claim? No single image of Mira wins universal acceptance, and a stubborn multiplicity remains. Her devotion to none but God, coupled with the resistance so fundamental to her character, appears to inhibit her complete incorporation into any political and social agenda (or institutionalized religious sect, for that matter). Many people also speak in her name-of their own suffering, of dignity and resistance in the face of oppression, of love fulfilled or denied.2 No authentic original body of works attributable to an individual woman of medieval Rajasthan has yet been reliably identified either, and stories and songs continue to multiply around her.3
Eroticism and the Woman Writer in Bengali Culture
Authors: Sen Nabaneeta Dev
Published: November 2023

First, writing is a social gesture; it is a form of self-expression allotted to men. In Bengali culture, most gestures are codified according to gender, and women’s gestures are especially clearly codified by the duties and space allotted to them by society.
The Feminist Movement in West Bengal: From the l 980s to the l 990s
Authors: Bose Mandakranta
Published: November 2023

The term “feminist” creates a mental block in West Bengal. The image of a feminist is not one that many women would like to have. Feminism has been variously associated with aggressiveness, sexual permissiveness, immodesty, lack of womanly virtues and antimotherhood and antifamily attitudes. In fact, it is a cocky counter to the “ideal woman,” who is selfless, obedient and home loving. The best adjective that can be bestowed on a Bengali woman is gharoa, usually translated as “homely,” actually meaning a homebody. The matrimonial columns in Bengali and English dailies abound in the standard formula, “Wanted: fair, educated, homely bride.”
Methods of Memory Research
Authors: Lockhart Robert S
Published: November 2023

Progress in memory research owes much to the richness of its methodology. The field’s many experimental paradigms and various techniques for measuring memory have provided the empirical foundation on which con temporary theory has been built. This is no minor achievement; the task of developing a behavioral methodology that will support inferences about memory systems and processes that are themselves not directly observable is a formidable challenge.
Transfer and Expertise
Authors: Kimball Daniel R , Holyoak Keith J
Published: November 2023

Readers having a passing familiarity with research on transfer and expertise might think it somewhat odd to find these two topics covered in a single chapter. After all, one of the most common generalizations from research on expertise is that expertise is domain and task specific: experts in a domain are exceptional at performing familiar tasks within that domain, but often poor at transferring that expertise to other domains or even, in many cases, to novel tasks within the same domain (see, e.g., Ericsson & Charness, 1994).
Columbia to Franklin Park and Beyond
Authors: Townes Charles H
Published: November 2023

0n January 1, 1948, I joined the Columbia University physics department as an associate professor with a $6,000 salary, only a bit lower than what I was being paid by Bell Labs. By then our second daughter, Ellen, had been born, but Frances and I thought we could get along in New York City on such a salary.
The rains of orion
Authors: Townes Charles H
Published: November 2023

During a 1963 meeting in Washington, D.C., a group of radio astronomers had dinner at the home of Gart Westerhout, a Dutch scientist then on the faculty of the University of Maryland. Alan Barrett of MIT, one of the guests, soon had the party buzzing over his news. He and colleagues from Lincoln Lab had detected a signal from space carrying the signature of OH, the very reactive, or “free radical” hydroxyl molecule. This was the first molecule discovered by radio astronomy, and only the fourth known in interstellar space (after CN, the cyanide radical, and CH and CH+, methine radicals).
Rabbinic Authority
Authors: Berger Michael S
Published: November 2023

This book examines the nature and sources of the unique authority accorded in Judaism to the Sages of the first five centuries AD. These teachers--often referred to reverentially as Chazal, a Hebrew acronym for "our Sages of blessed memory"--occupy a central and unrivalled position in traditional Judaism. Their statements, collected in the vast corpus of Rabbinic literature, serve as the basis for Halakhah (Jewish law) which developed since the Babylonian Talmud was redacted over thirteen centuries ago. Berger critically examines the notion of the Sages' authority, laying bare the assumptions that undergird it and the implications that follow from it. Berger's purpose is not to justify specific normative claims about talmudic law, but to show the deeply nuanced concept of authority in a textual and interpretive tradition.
Introduction
Authors: Berger Michael S
Published: November 2023

During the last two hundred years of Jewish history, the authority of Jewish law, Halakhah, has been one of the central issues with which many Jews have struggled, particularly those taking their first, often eager, steps into Western culture.1 For well over a millennium, Jewish society had been guided primarily by Jewish law as it was developed by the talmudic sages, known as “the Rabbis” with a capital R. Although certain groups, such as the Karaites, understood Judaism’s prescriptions differently, the majority of Jews continued to a rm their basic loyalty to Rabbinic Halakhah, even if their personal practice fell short of the ideal.2 To be sure, observance was, for the most part, not a matter of personal preference or choice; it was simply a way of life imbibed mimetically from one’s surrounding from earliest childhood.3 The internal cohesiveness of the Jewish community, coupled with the constant external pressures of a non-Jewish population intent on maintaining economic and social segregation (to varying de grees)4 essentially made fidelity to Halakhah a given for most Jews, barring exceptional cases.
The Dreams and Dramas of a Jealous Hindu Queen
Authors: Doniger Wendy
Published: November 2023

Dreams are a serious matter in classical Hinduism, indeed seriously material. This is a subject that I have treated elsewhere at some length,1 but it might be useful to summarize some basic Hindu approaches to dreams before focusing on the particular group of texts I wish to discuss. The Hindu attitude to dreams is part of a more general Hindu attitude to illusion, called maya. The entire material world is regarded, theoretically at least, as an illusion wrought by God for His (or Her) pleasure, for the game, the sport (lila); in a very basic sense, the universe (including ourselves) is a dream dreamt by God. This does not necessarily mean that it, and we, are unreal, though certain idealistic forms oflndian religions, both Buddhist and Hindu, do take this tack. On the contrary, for most South Asians it means that our own dreams are, in a sense, synchronized with those of the author of the universe and hence one of the most reliable sources of insight into the reality of that universe.
Engendering Dreams The Dreams of Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost
Authors: Assmann Aleida
Published: November 2023

In an aphorism titled “the error of dreams” (“Missverstandnis des Traumes”), Nietzsche wrote: “In dreaming, people of a primordial and primitive civilization believed they encountered another reality; this is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the evidence of dreams, human beings would not have been led to divide the world into two different realms.” Nietzsche, who passionately opposed a two worlds theory, identifies dreaming as the source of this heresy. In dreams, human beings could come to learn about “a second reality” that significantly differed from the “first reality” of everyday experience. For Nietzsche, the world of every-night experience that transcends, subverts, and perverts the rules accepted in the waking world nourishes the metaphysical fallacy. To associate dreams with metaphysics is an interesting but surprising move. In the wake of Aristotle, metaphysics was supposed to deal with a stable world of order unaffected by contingency. Certainty, regularity, and expectability were considered qualities of the world beyond this world, cleared of the erratic fits of hazard, mutability, and corruptibility, concentrating on “what is valid at all times or at least at most times.”
Real Values?
Authors: Kupperman Joel J
Published: November 2023

Thus far we have explored reasons why one might think that there are (following a loose and imperfect analogy with the five senses) senses of value, and that there sometimes is knowledge of value. But none of this gets us anywhere unless there is something of which to be aware and to know. The phenomena of seemingawareness of values and seeming-knowledge can be viewed through the lens of an “error theory” (see Mackie 1977).
Morality
Authors: Kupperman Joel J
Published: November 2023

The last chapter left us with two questions about morality: (1) in what kinds of case does the claim that it would be immoral constitute a good reason for not doing what would be optimific, and (2) are there indeed cases in which what is optimific is immoral. (Can there be, to repeat Leibniz’s phrase, a felix culpa?) These questions point toward the nature and authority of morality. We can begin by asking how moral judgments are to be distinguished from other judgments that recommend that we do or not do certain things.
Querying the Medieval
Authors: Inden Ronald , Walters Jonathan , Ali Daud
Published: November 2023

Indologist Ronald Inden has in the past raised questions about the images of a “traditional” or “medieval” India deployed by colonial scholars and rulers - “Orientalists” - and has also argued that a history of “early medieval” India very different from both the colonial and nationalist accounts could be written. This volume is designed as an important first step towards that goal. The authors look closely at three genres of texts that have been crucial to the representations of precolonial India. All three essays challenge not only colonialist scholarship but the attempts by religious nationalists to identify Hinduism as the essence of national identity in Idia and Buddhism as the essence of nationality in Sri Lanka.
Introduction
Authors: Coffey David
Published: November 2023

Like many of my generation, in my undergraduate studies I took a course on the Trinity that left me puzzled as to what conceivable relevance this topic could have for the rest of theology (apart, perhaps, from that of the Incarnation) or for the challenge of the Christian life. With hindsight it is not difficult to see that this was because the tract on the Trinity was separated from that on the One God and because it focused exclusively on the immanent Trinity (the Godhead considered “in itself,” apart from the economy of salvation). This situation, repeated all over the world, led in the sixties to the quiet dropping of the Trinity as a topic of study in theological curricula almost everywhere. Only now is the trend being reversed. This change is not just a matter of fad or fashion. It is occurring because of a growing perception and appreciation of the fact that salvation itself, the very gift of the spiritual life, has a trinitarian (and also ecclesial) structure, that is, it is God (the Father’s) salvation mediated to the Church by Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. We cannot understand salvation, spirituality, Christian living in the world without understanding at least something of the Trinity.
who was jesus? why it’s so hard to know
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

As I mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter, a wide range of scholars who have devoted their lives to studying the ancient sources for the historical Jesus have concluded that he proclaimed the imminent end of history as we know it. 1 think this view is probably right (even though it is not widely held outside the scholarly community) and I’m going to try to show why. I will argue that Jesus stood within a long line of Jewish prophets who understood that God was soon going to intervene in this world, overthrow the forces of evil that ran it, and bring in a new kingdom in which there would be no more war, disease, catastrophe, despair, hatred, sin, or death. And Jesus maintained that this new kingdom was coming soon, that in fact his own generation would see it. To that extent, at least, he was not so different from the predictors of the end who have numbered themselves among his followers ever since.
Bernard Airvaux
Authors: Evans G R
Published: November 2023

Renowned medievalist G.R. Evans here provides a concise introduction to St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a figure of towering importance on the twelfth-century monastic and theological scene. After a brief overview of Bernard's life, Evans focuses on a few major themes in his work, including his theology of spirituality and his theology of the political life of the Church. The only available introduction to Bernard's life and thought, this latest addition to the Great Medieval Thinkers series will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of history and theology.
“Difference Relates” Eclecticism Past and Present
Authors: Hatcher Brian A
Published: November 2023

There are many ways to answer the question, Who or what is an eclectic? The Frenchphilosophe Denis Diderot described the eclectic as someone who makes up his own philosophy by drawing freely upon his own experience and using his own reason as a guide. In the epigram here, Diderot announces that the eclectic is someone who is not afraid of trampling over dogma and authority if that’s what it will take to make “a philosophy of his own.” By endorsing eclecticism as an enlightened philosophy, Diderot wanted to emphasize that it promised a way to break free from dogmatism, that it guaranteed one the liberty to construct a philosophy based purely on one’s experience and the rational study of human history (Braun 1973: 153).
My Own Private Bungalow The Dynamics of Eclectic Home-Building
Authors: Hatcher Brian A
Published: November 2023

I would like to begin this chapter with an exercise in visualization. I ask the reader to form a mental image of a typical bourgeois homeowner from the recent American past. To assist us in our endeavor we might invoke the following suggestive passage from Walter Kidney’s study of eclecticism in American architecture:
Describing Primary Care
Authors: Starfield Barbara
Published: November 2023

This chapter describes the content of primary care practice in two countries with historically different emphases on primary care as the cornerstones of their health services system. A brief discussion of family orientation in primary care follows. The last section presents a chronology of primary care and subspecialist physicians in the United States and a consideration of the future of primary care practitioners in that country.
Evaluation of Primary Care: A Population View
Authors: Starfield Barbara
Published: November 2023

The subjects for evaluation of primary care systems and programs are the same as those for study of the quality of care with the exception that they are focused on populations rather than on patients. These subjects include resource capacity and services delivery as well as outcomes (health status of the population). However, sources of data are different and the focus is on the general population rather than on an enrolled population or a population of users of facilities. In the context of general populations, two aspects merit special consideration: adequacy of primary care services delivery and evaluation of outcomes that are particularly in the province of primary care. (The important issue of equity is addressed in Chapters 14 and 18.)
God: Knowledge And Agency
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

As we would expect, Scotus holds that God has intellect and will. He can know things, and he can will them. Scotus’s argument for this, however, does not make use of the perfect being methodology outlined at the beginning of chapter 3. Scotus does not believe that intellect and will are demonstrably pure perfections.
Bakkhai
Authors: Gibbons Reginald , Segal Charles
Published: November 2023

Regarded by many as Euripides' masterpiece, Bakkhai is a powerful examination of religious ecstasy and the resistance to it. A call for moderation, it rejects the temptation of pure reason as well as pure sensuality, and is a staple of Greek tragedy, representing in structure and thematics an exemplary model of the classic tragic elements. Disguised as a young holy man, the god Bacchus arrives in Greece from Asia proclaiming his godhood and preaching his orgiastic religion. He expects to be embraced in Thebes, but the Theban king, Pentheus, forbids his people to worship him and tries to have him arrested. Enraged, Bacchus drives Pentheus mad and leads him to the mountains, where Pentheus' own mother, Agave, and the women of Thebes tear him to pieces in a Bacchic frenzy. Gibbons, a prize-winning poet, and Segal, a renowned classicist, offer a skilled new translation of this central text of Greek tragedy.
The New Competitive Advantage in Apparel
Authors: Abernathy Frederick H , Dunlop John T , Hammond Janice H , Weil David
Published: November 2023

In the late 1940s, Bond Stores, the largest men’s clothing chain at the time, created a sensation in New York City by offering a wide selection of suits with two pairs of pants instead of one, reintroducing a level of product choice not seen since before the war. When the line of hopeful buyers at its Times Square store stretched around the block, Bond had to impose a limit of two suits per customer. During World War II, the apparel and textile industries had been converted to supply field jackets, overcoats, and uniforms to the U.S. and Allied Forces. But in the years immediately following the war, returning soldiers, the end of rationing, and pent-up customer demand meant apparel was in short supply.
The Past as Prologue: Historical Background on the U.S. Retail, Apparel, and Textile Industries
Authors: Abernathy Frederick H , Dunlop John T , Hammond Janice H , Weil David
Published: November 2023

The emergence of textile, apparel, and retail enterprises in the United States is full of fascinating twists. In 1790, for instance, an act of industrial espionage is said to have launched the domestic textile industry, if not American manufacturing in general. At that time, Samuel Slater, a skilled mechanic, built the first successful water-powered yarn spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Yarn was in short supply in the new country and much in demand in households that did hand weaving as well as in workplaces with looms that produced sheeting, shirting, and stockings for commerce. Some of the American states and improvement societies had even offered generous rewards for the establishment of water-powered combing and spinning, especially those based on state-of-the-art English Arkwright operations. But British law strictly prohibited the export of drawings, plans, or models of these new technologies. It took somebody like Slater-an indentured apprentice for over six years at the Arkwright and Strut’s plant in Milford, England-to ferry the plans to America.
The Sports Machine
Authors: Rojstaczer Stuart
Published: November 2023

I’m a big fan of athletics, particularly baseball. I played a wide range of sports as a kid, but didn’t have the talent to pursue anything beyond intramural sports in college. The sports section is the first part of the newspaper that I turn to every day during the baseball season. But I also pay attention to college basketball, especially now that I live in a part of the country where basketball dominates the sports section every winter. I will even watch the occasional college basketball game on TV if I can find the time. So in the winter of my first year, when I got a call from my dean asking if I wanted a pair of tickets to that night’s basketball game, I gladly accepted.