Christopher Hill Research Articles

Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, edited by Murat Aydede.

Our preoccupation with pain can seem an eccentricity of philosophers. But just a little reflection leads one into the thickets. When I see a pencil on my desk, I’m aware of a physical thing and its objective properties; but what am I aware of when I feel a pain in my toe? A pain, perhaps? Or my toe’s hurting? But what is the nature of such things? Are they physical? Are they objective? To avoid unexperienced pains, we might say they are subjective, or are themselves experiences. But do those with hurting toes therefore have experiences in their feet? The issues rapidly proliferate. Many of them are addressed in this interesting collection of original essays by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, edited by Murat Aydede. The book’s core comprises two symposia. In the first, Ned Block, Barry Maund, Paul Noordhof, and Aydede himself respond to Michael Tye’s representationalist account of pain. In the second, Shaun Gallagher, Morten Overgaard, Robert D’Amico, Robert Coghill, and Eddy Nahmias discuss Aydede and Donald Price’s sketch of a method for pain science. Further themes are explored beyond the symposia: Colin Allen and others discuss animal pain; Fred Dretske and Christopher Hill write on the epistemology of pain; and Thomas Polger and Kenneth Sufka address metaphysical issues, proposing a way of closing reductive physicalism’s ‘explanatory gap’.

ATP-dependent Proteases Differ Substantially in Their Ability to Unfold Globular Proteins

ATP-dependent proteases control the concentrations of hundreds of regulatory proteins and remove damaged or misfolded proteins from cells. They select their substrates primarily by recognizing sequence motifs or covalent modifications. Once a substrate is bound to the protease, it has to be unfolded and translocated into the proteolytic chamber to be degraded. Some proteases appear to be promiscuous, degrading substrates with poorly defined targeting signals, which suggests that selectivity may be controlled at additional levels. Here we compare the abilities of representatives from all classes of ATP-dependent proteases to unfold a model substrate protein and find that the unfolding abilities range over more than 2 orders of magnitude. We propose that these differences in unfolding abilities contribute to the fates of substrate proteins and may act as a further layer of selectivity during protein destruction.

John Clare, the Popular Wood-cut and the Bible: A Venture into the History of Popular Culture

Although as a child, Clare often missed Sunday church, later in life, he attended church services and held a deep reverence for the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Church of England (aside from a fling with the Primitive Methodists) He not only read the Bible and the prayer-book but also numerous theological works and moral treatises. (1) Though these treatises were usually given to him by his Evangelical friends, he read them and derived pleasure and profit from at least some of them. But his love of the church is based in his childhood, his family, and his village-community. Reared by a church-going father, strengthened by a largely Anglican community and educated in a vestry-school, his was the culture of the village-church, deepened and strengthened by his own extensive reading and reflection. As Greg Crossan showed over a quarter of a century ago, (2) for example, Clare had many unusual religious ideas--he was, for example, widely tolerant of other faiths--but he still found solace in the simple faith in which he had been brought up. He was not that far removed from Cottager who went to Church most Sundays and came home to study his Bible. (3) It was a book that inspired Clare all his life -particularly the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Song of Solomon, and the New Testament. Christopher Hill makes a good point about the last when he says: 'Christ and his Apostles were Illiterate men ... Caiaphas, Pilate and Herod were Learned.' Such words encapsulated what I suspect Clare thought but never formulated so precisely. (4) And Clare himself says: There are more pages of true sublimity to be found in the common translation of the Bible than in all the books I ever met with--In the account of the creation Noah's Flood--in the relations of Ruth in the book of Job and all the Prophets major and minor (5) Part of the complexity that Kelsey Thornton identifies in Clare includes an essential simplicity, a simplicity that survived his childhood in his love of Bible stories and inspired him to the end of his writing life. (6) His love of art is as overlooked as his devotion to biblical stories. Consider the strength of feeling with which he recalls seeing, during his first visit to Wisbech, an exhibition of E. V. Rippingille's pictures. (They seem to have mattered much more to him than his disappointment at being turned down for a job as a lawyer's clerk with his uncle's employer). (7) Then, after his first success as a writer and upon visiting it was Rippingille himself who arranged entrance for him to visit the exhibitions at the Royal Academy (8) and perhaps the Society of British Artists. Consider also his visits to some of the studios of artists of the day and his knowledge of the work of others--Sir Thomas Lawrence, William Etty, T.G Wainewright, F. Howard, Sir Francis Chantry, F.W. Smith, (9) the Behnes brothers, (10) (William Behnes and Henry Behnes Burlowe), and others. To these, add his acquaintance with William Hilton and Peter De Wint, around whom he wrote his essay on landscape-painting. This aspect, of Clare's artistic interests has preoccupied literary critics, especially John Barrell and Timothy Brownlow, (11) who deduced that Clare's artistic interests ran along the main roads of contemporary academic art. I suggest that the strongest influence upon Clare's sensibility was rather the tradition of Hogarth, Bewick, Gillray, Cruikshank and, perhaps, Rowlandson, and the popular wood-cuts of his day, which appeared on street-ballads, chap-books, broadsides, nursery rhymes, Cries of London, books of magic, almanacs, and newspapers. The wood-cuts had the greatest impact and strongest appeal because Clare had encountered them in his childhood, and what he saw first in life always remained with him: All I can reccole[c]t of the old book of Pomfrets, which my father used to read to me, was that it was full of wooden cuts and one at. the beginning of every poem, the first of which was two childen holding up a great Letter these pictures lured me to make an end of the book for one day I made use of an opportunity to cut them out and burnt the rest to avoid detection (12) The first line of Clare's poem, Childhood is past it is a magic word. …

‘Errors of Judgment’: The Case of Pain Sensations

Errors of judgment regarding pain sensations are not possible. Christopher Hill, in his paper ‘Introspective Awareness of Sensations’, argues that we do sometimes commit ‘errors ofjudgment’ and he draws on an example that involves the perception of pain to illustrate his point. I analyze Hill’s example and draw on other examples of pain sensations to show how errors of judgment are not possible. I argue that pain sensations appear to be causally shaped and in some cases generated solely by beliefs, expectations and dispositional states. Changes in beliefs, expectations and dispositional states appear to change the sensation that is generated. If pain sensations are generated in the way that I suggest, then the fact that some of the influences that causally shape and generate a pain sensation are constantly subject to change means that there may be little ‘truth’ that can be objectively established regarding a belief about a pain sensation. If there is little ‘truth’ that can be objectively established about a pain sensation, it will be inaccurate to label an instance of pain avowal as an ‘error of judgment’, or to speak about judgments concerning pain in terms of truth or error more generally.

Trauma and transformation: the political progress of John Bunyan

Vera Camden (ed.), Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. xiii + 185, hb. $55.00, ISBN: 978-0-8047-5785-0.Twenty years ago, around the tercentenary of John Bunyan's death, two books - N. H. Keeble's landmark critical anthology and Christopher Hill's biographical study - heralded a renaissance of scholarly interest in the tinker-author. This attention has matured in myriad ways since 1988, with significant recent scholarship - Isabel Hofmeyr's 'transnational history' of The Pilgrim's Progress, and the essays collected by W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim on the theme of Reception, Appropriation, Recollection - evincing unprecedented historical, methodological, and theoretical sophistication. Vera Camden's new anthology sets tough new standards for Bunyan scholarship in particular, and for intellectual collaboration in general. Both individually and collectively, the contributions to Trauma and Transformation reveal a network of cultural 'fault lines' that run far beyond the nonconformist frameworks that remain a staple of Bunyan studies. They initiate a timely reassessment of Bunyan's career and its place within early-modern literary history.Trauma and Transformation originates in unique circumstances. Most of the essays began life as papers delivered to a 2001 conference of the International John Bunyan Society, held in the United States just weeks after the 9/11 bombings. This grim coincidence could have encouraged a sentimental slant. In Camden's organisational and editorial hands, it lends poignancy and heightened cultural relevance to the theme of religious difference and, indeed, to the spirit of collective intellectual endeavour: 'it seems uncanny', Camden writes in her introduction, 'how our ongoing crisis appears to have been adumbrated in the cultural cataclysms of Bunyan's England'.The volume is anchored in the premise that the decapitation of Charles I caused a fundamental rupture in the national sensibility. It is also predicated on a chronological coincidence which, again, is much more than an easy motif. Camden notes that the milestones defining Bunyan's adulthood - his coming of age, and his death - fell respectively within the years of two national rites of passage: the regicide of 1649, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This neat observation leads to a more subtle and pressing one: followers, readers, and researchers of Bunyan have focused almost exclusively on the Restoration phase of his career (1660-85). These dates bound not only the bulk of Bunyan's literary career, but also the defining period of nonconformity - the time of the 'great persecution'. Imprisoned at the Restoration for refusing to go through the motions of Anglican cooperation, Bunyan has inevitably been contained, to broader and narrower degrees, within the framework of dissent. These essays point out, cumulatively, some obvious facts that have not been stated before: that Bunyan lived through violent constitutional upheaval long before, and a few years after, the Restoration; that the personal and the political are seldom differentiated into black and white; and that Bunyan's silence over overtly political events does not mean he was not affected by them. Probing between the lines of Bunyan's writings, and of his documented biography, they open up significant new perspectives which suggest that the strict-nonconformist Bunyan of popular and scholarly familiarity is known partially and reductively.Following Camden's lucid introduction, Peter L. Rudnytsky controversially identifies T. S. Eliot's theory of 'dissociation of sensibility' as 'the single most seminal contribution to English literary history of the twentieth century'. He argues for the psychoanalytic notion of a 'primal crime' - the transgression, or fall, or 'epistemological rupture' caused, he states, by the decapitation of Charles I; the consequence of this fissure is a traumatised self-consciousness which suffuses the works of authors such as Milton and Marvell. …

America’s Failed North Korea Nuclear Policy: A New Approach

America's North Korea nuclear policy has been a failure. Instead of achieving its goal of preventing North Korea from possessing and proliferating nuclear weapons, it has had the opposite effect. This failure was a result of the George W. Bush administration's blanket rejection of the previous administration's approach to North Korea, the tendency to ignore the advice of experts, neoconservative influence on foreign policy, and divisions within the administration resulting in an inconsistent approach. This article suggests a bold new approach in which the United States offers North Korea full diplomatic recognition and a formal end to the Korean War as first steps toward the goals established in the 2007 Six Party Talks on North Korea, i.e., that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons programs, and cease its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Taking these moves as a starting point rather than a reward for compliance will deepen North Korea's commitment to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation by removing its gravest external security threat-the United States. Key words: U.S. foreign policy in East Asia, North Korea, nuclear weapons, multilateral security - East Asia The Failure of U.S. Policy There can be no denying that America's North Korea nuclear policy since 2000 has been a failure. U.S. policy goals regarding North Korea's nuclear programs have focused primarily on deterring North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, and preventing North Korea from proliferating technology, knowhow, or materials related to its nuclear program to other states. Yet since 2000, North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), ejected international inspectors from its plutonium processing facilities and removed monitoring devices, and declared itself a nuclear-weapons club member by testing with marginal success a rudimentary nuclear device. It has shown itself not only willing to proliferate nuclear technology and materials, as well as the missile hardware and technology to potentially deliver them, but to have already done so to Iran, Pakistan, and Syria.1 In short, the administrations of both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have failed to deter North Korea from developing and testing nuclear weapons, and have failed to keep North Korea from proliferating nuclear weapons technology and materials to states of concern to the United States. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill's recent attempts via bilateral meetings within the Six Party Talks (6PT) to draw North Korea into a bilateral agreement with the United States have been admirable. Moreover, U.S. flexibility, shown in the 2007 agreement that has been reached with North Korea, and the October 2008 removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, are goodfaith efforts on Washington's part, and are certainly moves in the right direction. Unfortunately, they are still too little, too late. As has been the case with U.S. policy toward Cuba, the United States has preferred to isolate North Korea rather than pursue the path followed with China in the 1970s, i.e., recognizing and engaging constructively with it. Despite its imperfections today, China and Chinese foreign-policy behavior have changed remarkably since the change in U.S. policy toward it. This is not true of Cuba, however, nor is it true of North Korea, which begs the question, why doesn't the United States try something truly novel in its dealings with North Korea? In this sense, today's U.S. policy makers have much to learn from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who exhibited fortitude and creativity in forging a radically new policy toward China in the early 1970s during the height of the Vietnam War and the cold war. This article will first provide a brief overview of U.S. policy toward the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) regarding the recent nuclear standoff and the 6PT. …

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Can the New Nuclear Deal with North Korea Succeed?

Can the New Nuclear Deal with North Korea Succeed?The new nuclear deal hammered out in Beijing in mid-February 2007 is a very tentative and limited first step toward ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, it creates numerous new problems without solving any fundamental issues. Prospects for its eventual success could prove worrisome.On the plus side, the accord is a step away from confrontation toward preserving peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia. The Bush Administration, after four years of exchanging heated rhetoric with Pyongyang and reliance on ineffective coercive tactics like economic sanctions, has finally decided to negotiate with Pyongyang. Frankly, this has always been the only way to achieve a peaceful diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear issue. Simply put, at long last negotiations have finally just begun.But the accord's negative aspects outweigh its positive points. It is not a new This is a tentative deal. If North Korea does not like the direction of future negotiations, it can pull out at any time and restart its nuclear reactor. The Agreed Framework was not a tentative deal. It was a package deal-all or nothing. The 1994 accord froze all nuclear activities and put all North Korean nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring. The new deal says that the DPRK will discuss with other parties the scope of nuclear activities to be covered. Also the details IAEA monitoring are to be agreed between IAEA and DPRK. The Agreed Framework resolved such issues prior to its finalization.In other words, the new agreement reverses the process that led to the Agreed Framework. Numerous working level discussions were held in New York and elsewhere to resolve the details of implementation prior to the agreement's conclusion. Under this new deal, North Korea can control the entire process because it can threaten to unfreeze its nuclear activities anytime that it is unhappy with one or more of the working group negotiations.Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill has incorrectly claimed that the new deal is better than the old one because it is He simply does not know his history. The Agreed Framework was multilateral. Prior to its finalization, the United States forged an international consensus supportive of the accord by consulting daily for eighteen months with Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing and Moscow, not to mention many other governments. Also, the Agreed Framework was designed to support the multilateral IAEA, an agency of the United Nations. The Bush Administration has openly and repeatedly belittled the effectiveness of the IAEA and its director, even calling for his replacement.The new accord's shortcomings suggest that the Bush Administration was desperate to continue the Six Party Talks at any price. Over-extended militarily in the Middle East, the Bush Administration cannot afford instability on the Korean Peninsula. …

NAGEL VS. NAGEL ON THE NATURE OF PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS

AbstractIn a footnote to his ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel sketches a promising account of phenomenal concepts that purports to explain why mind‐body identity statements, even if necessary, will always seem contingent. Christopher Hill and Brian McLaughlin have recently developed this sketch into a more robust theory. In Nagel's more recent work, however, he suggests that the only adequate theory of phenomenal concepts is one that makes the relation between phenomenal and physical states intelligible, or ‘transparent’. Developing such a theory, however, appears to be no easy task. In this paper I argue that the Nagel‐Hill‐McLaughlin proposal is preferable – and that a serious problem with it, noticed by Stephen Yablo, can be avoided by revising the proposal according to some further suggestions made by Nagel himself.

"Take it and eat it up": The Bible, Culture, and Taste

Jonathan Sheehan's excellent The Enlightenment Bible explores how authority of the Bible was reconstituted as a piece of heritage of the West (xi) between the Reformation and the nineteenth century in both Germany and England. Sheehan has written a book about the Bible that is both learned and accessible, making The Enlightenment Bible a worthy sequel to the classic works of Hans Frei, Stephen Pricket, and David Norton, and historical surveys by Christopher Hill and Brian Moynahan of the Bible and its influence on particular eras. Sheehan's argument also complements and complicates the idea of a conservative clerical Enlightenment offered by historians such as J. G. A. Pocock, Jonathan Clark, and Brian Young. Like them, Sheehan rejects the traditional association of the Enlightenment and secularization, which he understands to be more about the transformation and reconstruction of religion than its disappearance (xi). Rather than constituting a single, sacred object like the Reformation Bible, the Enlightenment Bible becomes an ongoing intellectual project (91) designed to demonstrate the Bible's continued relevancy to evolving modernity. The Bible in the eighteenth century gained a range of new authorities grounded in the modern disciplinary domains of philology, pedagogy, history, and poetry (91).

"Impious War": Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V

"Impious War":Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V John S. Mebane A central issue in recent Shakespearean criticism is the question of the relation between historical and political analysis and studies of aesthetic form. Cultural critics often analyze the text as a reflection of a culture's ideological assumptions and eschew any interest in the playwright's artistic methods. In their influential cultural materialist essay "History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V," Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield emphasize that the conflicts and contradictions in the play's use of religion to rationalize the conquest of France are reflections of early modern English culture. Somewhat more subtle in its analysis of authorial subjectivity is Richard Hillman's recent book, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Politics of France, in which Hillman's concern is "not with the telling of stories but with the overlapping of English and French discursive spaces to produce political meanings-meanings that define collective subjectivity."1 Although Hillman's analysis of the relations among Henry V and other texts sometimes acknowledges differences, his study nonetheless exemplifies the persistence of the widespread tendency to emphasize the text's participation in a field of discourse rather than seeing the play as a unique work of art. While some cultural critics argue that Henry V reflects cultural conflict, others have seen the play as monolithic in its aggressive nationalism.2 Among the most thoroughgoing critiques of the recent [End Page 250] emphasis on history and ideology as opposed to aesthetics is Graham Bradshaw's Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists, in which Bradshaw provides extensive analysis of Shakespeare's dramatization of conflicting political positions in Henry V and concludes that the play as a whole cannot be identified with any one ideological position. In other words, Bradshaw offers us a significantly updated version of the belief that literature transcends politics.3 In this essay I shall argue that formalist analysis is a necessary prerequisite for discussion of a play's ideology, and that it need not be associated with the claim that great literature is politically neutral. I shall place my commentary on Henry V in the context of an interpretation of Shakespeare's treatment of religion and the ideology of warfare throughout the first and second historical tetralogies. I suggest that all eight of these plays dramatize the discrepancy between the pacifism grounded upon key elements of the New Testament, on the one hand, and the devotion of the aristocratic warrior classes to an ideology of warfare, on the other. That ideology is a compound of codes of chivalry, traditional Judeo-Christian "just war" doctrine, and pagan heroic tradition. [End Page 251] While there are many Renaissance texts that are univocal and dogmatic in their jingoism, and others that are pacifist or nearly pacifist, the cultural work of much medieval and Renaissance literature is making warfare acceptable to Christians, and this process is often accompanied by significant cognitive dissonance. In contrast to influential interpretations that view the conflicts of Shakespeare's text primarily as a reflection of Shakespeare's culture and thus minimize the playwright's artistry, I argue that the dramatic form and artistic strategies of Shakespeare's history plays-especially Henry V-undercut the ideology of "just war" by emphasizing the fear that all warfare is damnable. Among the artistic methods that I shall highlight are Shakespeare's ironic deflations of patriotic rhetoric, his use of comic parody of chauvinistic characters (including the Chorus), and his juxtapositions of exhortations to warfare with biblical and theological allusions that undermine the king's rationale for the invasion. Much recent Shakespearean criticism has done an excellent job of explaining how religion was often appropriated to rationalize wars of conquest.4 There has, however, been considerably less attention among Shakespeareans to the history of the pacifist or nearly pacifist elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition. My approach to Shakespeare's history plays draws upon the work of Robin Headlam Wells, Christopher Hill, [End Page 252] and Ben Lowe, all of whom have expanded our knowledge of the ways in which religion was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as metaphysical ground for a very wide range of social and...

Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830-1945 Len Platt (bio) Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830-1945 edited by Fintan Lane and Donal Ó DrisceoilBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 295 pp. $79.95. The cover note of Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830-1945 points out that this is the "first ever collection of scholarly essays on the history of the Irish working class." These fourteen essays, ranging from such subjects as Robert Owen and cooperatism in Ulster in the 1830s to politics and the Irish working class during World War II, are, without exception, informative and well researched. Largely untouched by the theoretical considerations, Politics and the Irish Working Class is a confident and much-needed contribution to Irish historiography. Granted there can be no return here to the heady metanarratives of the likes of Edward Thompson and Christopher Hill,1 but in the disengagement from any idea that "class" in general, and the "working class" in particular, might be the product of cultural construction, Politics and the Irish Working Class formulates itself in largely unproblematic intellectual terms where discourse seems ousted by the high craft of history writing. The collection, in short, is not much interested in theoretical introspection, and it comes off none the worse for that. It has to be said, however, that the application of this kind of work to Joyce studies, for all the current interest in Joyce and history, is not immediately obvious—a useful reminder that "history" comes in different shapes and sizes, for Irish culture as all others. Occasionally one comes across the odd piece of information in this collection that clearly intersects with Joyce: the material on J. P. Nannetti in Emmet O' Connor's excellent piece on how colonization, in all its dimensions, shaped labor politics across the period 1830-1945 (32), for example, and a reference to the cattle trade (102), which links the export of cattle with emigration and hunger, as Mr. Power does in "Hades" when he observes that the livestock being herded down to the quays are "[e]migrants" (U 6.389). There is also the broader application of the material on such figures as Charles Stewart Parnell and Daniel O'Connell. In a highly suggestive essay on Chartism, O'Connell, and 1848, for instance, Christine Kinealy usefully articulates the conservatism of O'Connell ("the man who did most to forge the link between Irish nationalism and Catholicism"—4) and the strength of his opposition to labor politics. Here an interesting and important contradiction, between Joyce's espousal of socialism and the lyrical evocations of the O'Connell effect in such places as "Aeolus," is fully exposed (U 7.880-83). But such applications hardly come pouring off the pages of Politics and the Irish Working Class, which is, for the most part, located elsewhere, in a number of senses. Some pieces are geographically remote [End Page 605] from the Joyce text, concerned with events in Belfast, Limerick, or Cork; others are temporarily distinct, set early in the nineteenth century or late in the twentieth. Above all, however, it is, ironically enough, the level of detail, the localness, and the concern with people who largely fail to register in the Joycean landscape that really separate Politics and the Irish Working Class from the Joyce text. A piece like Maria Luddy's "Working Women, Trade Unionism and Politics in Ireland, 1830-1945" (44-61), concerned with people like Delia Larkin (the sister of Jim Larkin) and Helena Moony, who both worked for the Irish Women Workers' Union in the early twentieth century, inhabits a world that appears to have no real parallel in Joyce's reproduction of Dublin. Similarly Maura Cronin's account of how workers in Cork and Limerick responded to Parnellism in the 1880s involves a political environment of skilled artisans, unskilled workers and casual workers, and trade unionists and trade councils that is quite "other" from the version of Irish society produced in, say, Dubliners (140-53). Interestingly enough, Politics and the Irish Working Class provides one potential answer to the absence of the Irish working class from the Joycean text. For all the care they take over the documentation...

Learning the Lessons: Peacemaking in Israel and Northern Ireland

Learning the Lessons: Peacemaking in Israel and Northern Ireland

Global Visions and Grassroots Movements: An Anthropological Perspective

AbstractIn the past decade many progressive anthropologists have been concerned with understanding the transformative possibilities of social movements in redefining and limiting the worldwide inroads of global capital. In emphasizing cultural transformation, Castells’ approach in The City and the Grassroots (1983) may help to conceptualize the idealistic and sometimes quixotic movements of the information age. Like Christopher Hill and other social historians, Castells seeks to understand culturally available paths and ideals that opened the possibilities for democracy, whether or not the visionaries succeeded at any particular historical moment. Today, working‐class solidarity is less clearly defined in the face of a rapidly shrinking and ever‐relocating manufacturing sector, while, at the same time, social provisions have been cut back and privatized. At the grey dawning of the twenty‐first century, in the face of US imperialist aggression and increasing global corporate wealth, Castells’ emphasis on the genesis of a new democratic vision as well as on mobilization around issues of collective consumption has become ever more salient.

Remarks on Christopher Hill's Thought and World

One of Christopher Hill's aims in his new book is to bring about what he calls a marriage of heaven and hell.1 Hill proposes a way of joining together ideas about the concept of that are often seen to be in irreconcilable conflict: deflationism and the theory.2 Hill's proposal, I want to suggest, is one that theorists can happily accept. It is the deflationists that are likely to resist it. But I do not see in this any argument against Hill's elegant proposal. Hill's proposal works, essentially, by assigning separate domains to the conflicting parties: there are two notions of truth, and one is to be allotted to the theorists and the other to the deflationists.3 Both notions pertain to propositions or in Hill's preferred terminology, which I shall follow, thoughts. Thoughts, as Hill conceives of them, are objects of attitudes such as belief and desire. More specifically, they are logically structured entities and have concepts as their fundamental constituents. Both notions of have thoughts as their domain of application, but the two carve out this domain in different ways. The notion allotted to the theorist call it correspondence truth or truthc may be defined as follows:

Studying Their Own Nation Without Insularity? The British Marxist Historians Reconsidered

Contemporary interest in social history owes much to the work of a generation of British Marxist historians, including Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, who popularized the idea of history from below. A key concept in their work was that of the “people.” The populism was no accident, but can be explained in terms of debates within interwar Marxism, and the adoption by the British Communist Party after 1935 of the Popular Front tactic. It was also no single strand but a family of rhetorical devices. Populism was employed differently by Thompson and Hobsbawm, let alone by the other members of the group.

The EU and the Bosnian Civil War 1992–95: The Capabilities–Expectations Gap at the Heart of EU Foreign Policy

Using the empirically driven case study of the European Union's response to the Bosnian civil war 1992–95 this article assesses the effectiveness of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), through Christopher Hill's ‘capabilities–expectations gap framework’. In assessing effectiveness it explores both the expectations placed on the EU and the capabilities the Union was able to deploy. Moreover, this research suggests that the EU was ineffective in responding to the Bosnian crisis. The EU pursued a rigid strategy of diplomatic and economic foreign policy, failing to generate the political will to attempt alternative approaches. This research argues that the capabilities–expectations gap framework is a useful tool for conceptualising the EU's effectiveness but that it under-specifies the importance of the end result of the policy.

Replies to Commentators

I am glad to be the recipient of such interesting and penetrating comments. I am also grateful that they are so helpfully complementary. Christopher Hill is largely concerned with my initial argument for materialism. Tim Crane's raises doubts specifically about my explanation of the antipathetic fallacy. Diana Raffman wonders whether my account of phenomenal concepts is adequate to our powers of perceptual discrimination and introspective awareness. I shall discuss their comments in that order.

Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity; Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature

Book Review| June 01 2005 Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity; Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. By Maeda Ai. Edited by James A. Fujii. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xv + 391 pp.; Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature By Kamei Hideo. Edited by Michael Bourdaghs. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002. lxxii + 300 pp. Christopher Hill Christopher Hill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2005) 66 (2): 261–265. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-66-2-261 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher Hill; Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity; Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature. Modern Language Quarterly 1 June 2005; 66 (2): 261–265. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-66-2-261 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 University of Washington2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Unity We have and the Unity We Seek: Ecumenical Prospects for the Third Millennium

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction Part One: Unity And Plurality: Reconceiving The Difficulties 1. Urs Von Arx: Identity, Plurality, Unity - What's the Right Blend? Some Reflections from an Old Catholic Perspective 2. Nicholas Sagovsky: Anglicans and Roman Catholics. A Joint Declaration of Agreement? 3. David Carter: Methodists and the Ecumenical Task 4. Peter McEnhill: The Reformed Tradition and the Ecumenical Task - 'A Vulnerable Catholicity' 5. Jeremy Morris: The Unity We Seek. Prospects for the Local Church 6. Keith Clements: The Future of Ecumenism in Europe 7. Valentin Dedji: Between Christ and Caesar, the Politics of Mission and Ecumenism Encountering African Myths and Realities Part Two: Prospects For Ecumenism 8. Michael Root: Once More on the Unity We Seek, Testing Ecumenical Models 9. Mary Tanner: The Goal of Visible Unity, Yet Again 10. Jean-Marie Tillard: Ex Tenebris Lux, Ecumenism Enters a New Phase 11. Christopher Hill: Route-planning the Future Ecumenical Journey Conclusion Appendix Index