Britannica Research Articles

Nuclear War and World Citizenship

_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 Reviews 187 NUCLEAR WAR AND WORLD CITIZENSHIP Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratoflampsacus@aol.com Robert Hinde and Joseph Rotblat. War No More: Eliminating Conflict in the Nuclear Age. London and Sterling, Va.: Pluto P., 2003. Pp. x, 228. £40.00; us$50.00; isbn 0745321925 (hb). £11.99; us$17.95 (pb). ast year marked the 50th anniversary of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, Lwhich sought to put the world on guard against the hydrogen bomb’s dangers . The last surviving signatory to the manifesto was Joseph Rotblat, who died on 31 August 2005. In 1995, Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. During World War ii, Joseph Rotblat participated in the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. An Encyclopaedia Britannica article on his Nobel prize explains that “Although he was uncomfortable about participating in the creation of an atomic bomb, Rotblat initially believed that the weapon would be used only to deter a German threat. After learning in 1944 that it would be used to contain the Soviet Union, a World War ii ally, he left the project….” Upon returning to England in 1945, Rotblat left defence work for medical research. He served as founding secretary-general and later as president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which began in 1957 and at which key scientists and others from different countries could confer about the peril of nuclear weapons facing the world. As a medical physicist at London University’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College (1950–76), Rotblat directed attention toward the biological hazards of nuclear radiation and the severity of fallout from atmospheric testing. He worked closely with Russell in the 1950s and early ’60s and still visited him in his last years. (See his “Personal Reminiscences”, Russell, 18 [1998]: 5–24.) The book’s co-author, Robert Hinde, is the author of numerous books and articles in psychology. The book addresses the planet’s current state in terms of weapons of mass destruction. It features many tables and charts on matters ranging from the varying levels of the super-powers’ nuclear warhead stockpiles to the principal nuclear arms control treaties to estimates of military deaths in individual wars during the last 60 years. Since this book is an earnest endeavour to address the issue of weapons of mass destruction, many of its most fundamental prescriptions sound basic, even _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 188 Reviews somewhat banal. To be sure, the authors acknowledge that “Any attempt to discuss ways of preventing war must address very basic issues, and in so doing lays itself open to accusations of mushy idealism” (pp. 214–15). In War No More the authors opt to err in the direction of moral truisms as a small price to pay if there is a chance of contributing to a discussion eventually compelling the world’s political leaders to heed such moral considerations. In the prevention of conflict, “Often the success of such efforts may be unknown to the wider world just because the criterion of success is simply that nothing happens” (p. 198). Hinde and Rotblat urge their readers to understand the absolute need to abolish war if humanity is to endure in this nuclear age. Their position is that “the very possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. Their enormous destructive power, inflicted on civilians even more than on the military, would make their use unforgiveable” (p. 139). The authors expressly credit Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein with having taken the initiative for international action on this front (p. 189). And as was the view of Russell and Einstein 50 years earlier, Hinde and Rotblat proclaim in their book that “The only solution is international agreement on the total abolition of nuclear weapons” (p. 139). Hinde and Rotblat concede the ease with which people can be pessimistic about the prospects of abolishing war. However, the formidable challenge posed by such a task is deemed “no excuse for inaction”. They cite historic instances in which humanity has...

German Popular Enlightenment in the Russian Empire: Peter Ernst Wilde and Catherine II

SEER, Vol.84, No. 2, April2006 German Popular Enlightenment in the Russian Empire: Peter Ernst Wilde and Catherine II ROGER BARTLETT THEproblem of the nature and definition of 'the Enlightenment'has engendereda wide range of responsesamong historians.Some scholars approached it essentially as a movement of ideas, the manifestation of changing consciousness,concepts and values among the eighteenthcentury European intellectual elite ideas particularly leading towardsfreedom in all its varied meanings.' The locusclassicus for such views was France, from where allegedly lesLumieres spread out further acrossthe Continent. The focuswas on big names, big ideas, big books perhaps the most famous of all being the Encyclopedie.2 Other scholars have laid different emphases. British historians, especially Roy Porter, have brought Britain to the fore as a primary centre of the phenomenon, and some researchershave laid greaterstresson national variationsand individuality,speakingabout European Enlightenments in the plural.3More attention has been drawn, too, to the social and Roger Bartlett is Professor Emeritus of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and Special Professor in the School of Modern Languages, University of Nottingham. An earlier version of this article was read to the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia at its meeting inJanuary 2005. I am most grateful for comments received there, and to Simon Dixon, Isabel de Madariaga, Gary Marker and Claus Scharf for further generous comment and advice. 1 For instance, Paul Hazard, La Orise dela conscience europkenne (I680-I7I5), Paris, I935; Peter Gay, TheEnlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols, London, I967-70. 2 Following Chambers' Cyclopaedia. The eighteenth century was the first great age of modern encyclopaedias, also the time when the term itself became established. Besides the first major German encyclopaedia,J. H. Zedler's great Grof,e vollstandige Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften undKunste ... (64 + 4 vols, Halle-Leipzig, I732-54), Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie oudictionnaire raisonne dessciences, desartset desmetiers (35 vols, Paris,I75I-80), and the Encyclopaedia Britannica(initially 3 vols, Edinburgh, I768-7I, but succeeding editions expanded rapidly), the first printed Chinese encyclopaedia appeared, the enormous Gujin tushujicheng ('Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Present Times'), Beijing, 1726. It covers some 8oo,ooo pages and uses more than ioo million characters. 3 R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context,Cambridge, io8i; S. Juttner and J. Schlobach (eds), Europaische Aujklarung(en). Einheit und nationaleVieyfalt, Hamburg, I992 (hereafter, Europdische Aujklddrung(en)); Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britainandthe Makingof theModernWorld,London, 2000 (hereafter, Enlightenment). ROGER BARTLETT 257 economicunderpinnings of the spreadof newideas,whetherin classbasedanalysessuchasJurgenHabermas 's thesisof the 'publicsphere' or in investigations of the book-trade andpublishing industry. Anotherpartof thismorerecenttrendemphasizes whathasbeen called the popularEnlightenment attemptsto relate the great abstract ideasto realeveryday life,or to usethemin practical waysto improvesociety.Alreadyat the beginningof the eighteenthcentury, thinkers wereanticipating KarlMarxinwantingnotjustto understand the world,but also to changeit.4As the centurywore on, a major development in European societieswastheeffortby benevolent membersoftheeducatedclasses privatepeopleindividually orin groups, or throughofficialagencies to spreadtheir light more widely throughsociety,to reachdownto the commonpeopleandhelpraise them out of ignorance,superstition and the commonills and vices of theirdailyexistence.Such socialactivistsactedfroma varietyof motives rationalcalculation,socialengineering,philanthropic or religious altruism. Therewasoftena strongelementofdutyandobligation ,moralor religious or both.The ethicalmodelof the 'enlightened patriot'couldoffera wayof life and approachto socialactionwhich constituted effectively a secularalternative to religious vocation.5 PopularEnlightenment alsoaccordedperfectly withthe leadingcameralist andphysiocratic theoriesof statecraft of the latereighteenthcentury; nordiditconflictwiththeideasofAdamSmithwhichbecameinfluentialaroundthe turnof the century.It combinedcameralist raison d'etat andbeliefin rationalordering of societywithpatriotic zealforcountry andfatherland, andwithChristian charitytowardsthe lessfortunate. Holger Boning,a recenthistorianof this phenomenonin the Germanies ,dieVolksaujkldrung, hastracedthe evolutionof sucheighteenthcenturyEnlightenedtheoryand practicein severalstages:from the abstractintellectualEnlightenmentto the 'economicand publicly useful' (gemeinniitzig-dkonomischen) phase, concernedparticularlywith agrarianand medical improvement,and throughto the 'popular Enlightenment' andits growingconcernforpopulareducation.6 This practical andactivistapproach to thespreadof Enlightenment became 4 Porter, Enlightenment, esp. chap. 3. 5 Discussed in the context of our area by Annelies Grasshof, 'Zur Mentalitat livlandischer Aufldarungsschriftsteller. Der Patriotismus August Wilhelm Hupels', in H. Ischreyt (ed.), ZentrenderAujkldrung, 2: KICnigsberg und Riga, Tubingen, 1995, pp. 2I7-35 (hereafter, 'Zur Mentalitat livlandischer'). 6 Holger Boning, 'Gemeinnutzig-okonomische Aufkldarung und Volksaufklarung. Bemerkungen zum Selbstverstandnis und zur Wirkung der praktisch-popularen Aufkldarungim deutschsprachigen Raum' (hereafter, 'Gemeinntitzig-okonomische Aufkldarung'), injJuttner, Schlobach, Europaische Aujklarung(en), pp. 2I8-48; see also, Das Volkim...

BOOK REVIEW: David Philip Miller.DISCOVERING WATER: JAMES WATT, HENRY CAVENDISH AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ?WATER CONTROVERSY,?. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004.

Reviewed by: Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century “Water Controversy” John Broich (bio) Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century “Water Controversy”, by David Philip Miller; pp. vii + 316. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004, £60.00, $114.95. In the early 1780s, aristocratic natural philosopher Henry Cavendish conducted a series of experiments in which he burned together common air and inflammable air [End Page 574] (hydrogen) for the purpose of measuring the resulting reduction in their total volume. Along the way, he found that the exploded airs left behind a coating of dew on his glass apparatus. Intrigued, he conducted a new series of experiments that showed that, when burned at a proportion of two parts inflammable air to one part common air, the airs, in his words, "turned into pure water" (qtd. in Miller 29). At the time, Cavendish did not claim that he had discovered that water was a compound of two gases. Mechanical engineer James Watt, the perfecter of the steam engine, had already deduced that water could "be converted into some kind of air" if only it could be heated enough; on learning of Cavendish's experiment in 1783, he explained the observation as the outcome of the combination of airs (qtd. in Miller 51). "Water," he wrote, "is composed of dephlogisticated (oxygen) and inflammable air, deprived of their latent heat [through an explosion]" (qtd. in Miller 30). Which one of these men, then, discovered that water was not an element, but rather a compound of gases? The question ignited a controversy that outlived them both. David Philip Miller does not take part in this dispute; he is more interested in why the two men believed they discovered the composition of water and especially in the various processes through which individuals in later years attributed each of them with the discovery. By studying these two phases of the "water controversy," Miller hopes to understand how different interested parties within early Victorian scientific culture employed rival strategies to crown their respective champions as the discoverer of water's true nature. Miller briefly describes the contest between the rival claimants—which at that time also included Antoine Laurent Lavoisier—in the late eighteenth century. Miller is more concerned with—and readers of Victorian Studies may well be more interested in— the secondary contest over attributing the discovery in the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time, different camps aligned on either side of the Watt-Cavendish divide according to personal, national, and professional interests. On Watt's side stood his son, championing his father as a natural philosopher—something more, in his eyes, than just a mere engineer. James Watt, Jr., undertaking what Miller terms a "filial project," doggedly defended his father's position as water's discoverer in journals, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and in correspondence with members of the scientific community. He also worked closely with the second most important Watt promoter, natural philosopher Dominique Arago, whose motives were rooted in his perception of the scientific culture of his native France. Arago complained that the science of the academy was not feeding his country's industrial development. For him, Watt provided the model for linking theory and utility, and Arago's Eloge de James Watt (1839) was a powerful force through which he advocated his position. Miller's analysis of Arago's motives and actions provides a commendable cross-cultural study-within-a-study. In the most fascinating chapters of the book, Miller describes those who hoist the banner of Cavendish. It is in these chapters that Miller uses the water controversy to shed light on important changes taking place in the culture of Victorian science in the early to mid-century. Those who championed Cavendish, explains Miller, did so for the way he served their project of delimiting the boundaries of their field. Individuals such as William Vernon Harcourt, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, attributed the discovery to Cavendish because of the way he practiced science, because Cavendish asked the right questions—seeking truth rather than utility—and because Cavendish, like other Oxford, Cambridge, and Metropolitan elites, was a proper [End Page...

The Beat

The Beat

Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica

The alphabetical encyclopedias that flourished in Europe after the sixteenth century were easy to consult but open to criticism for breaking up knowledge and destroying its unity. Lacking the prescribed course of reading of textbooks, treatises, and thematically organized encyclopedias, such works invited readers to choose their own points of entry and subsequent trajectories. Not only did the "circle of knowledge" at the origin of the encyclopedic tradition risk being obscured by arbitrarily arranged articles, individual arts and sciences were alleged to be trivialized by encyclopedists' acceptance of fragmentation. Alphabetical works of reference came with too many benefits—and too much appeal in an age in which knowledge was starting to be seen as public property and an element of sociability—to succumb to such criticism, but efforts were made to reconnect knowledge dispersed by the alphabet, whether through prefatory trees of knowledge, rubrics locating articles in larger units, or cross-references. The prospectus to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) announced that alongside articles, the proposed work would offer extended entries, or "treatises," on the arts and sciences in an attempt to spare readers the "labor of hunting for science through … a labyrinth."1 Typographical [End Page 57] differences in their titles and running heads reinforced the distinction between articles and treatises. In the third (1788–97) and fourth (1801–09)editions of the Britannica, many treatises were written by specialized contributors, an association that added to the work's growing prestige and marketability. Meanwhile in France, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke had begun publishing the Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832), a work consisting of independent, mostly alphabetical dictionaries on different subjects. Like the Britannica, the Méthodique attempted to preserve disciplines as wholes without renouncing alphabetical order, an effort that lent itself to the recruitment of expert contributors and reflected the increasing specialization of the sciences toward 1800.2 Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica's treatises, like the disciplinary dictionaries of the Encyclopédie méthodique, were written in response to the scientific and commercial culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they nonetheless first appeared in the original edition of 1768, a work compiled single-handedly by a generalist, the printer William Smellie. Ironically, we understand the ends that treatises served around 1800 better than the reasons for their appearance in the first edition of the Britannica. Similarly lengthy entries had been common in thematic encyclopedias, but almost none of the Britannica's alphabetical predecessors made use of such treatises, the notable exception being Dennis de Coetlogon's An Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745). Since the early nineteenth century, resemblances have been pointed out between the organization of the first edition of the Britannica and that of Coetlogon's Universal History, but an influence of the latter on the former has never been more than conjectured.3 Nor have relations between the two works been analyzed. Here, after reviewing the treatment of disciplines in previous encyclopedias in order to gauge the novelty of the treatises in the Britannica and the Universal History, I will argue that Smellie did borrow the idea of treatises from Coetlogon's work, where they reflected the author's concern for aristocratic education and his enthusiasm for old-fashioned, Cartesian systems. Smellie's adaptation of treatises to his own more democratic, empirical aims testifies to their versatility as tools for organizing knowledge. Thereafter I will survey the evolution of treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica through the early twentieth century. Although the number of treatises grew with every edition, their length tended to decrease after 1800, so that the proportion of pages in treatises remained relatively constant for some time and even declined in the nineteenth century. The fact that treatises were growing shorter and more uniform in length by the mid-nineteenth century suggests that the Britannica's editors were exercising greater control over contributors, the latter's prestige notwithstanding, in the interest of creating...

Is Cosmopolitanism Not For Women?: Migration in Qurratulain Hyder's Sita Betrayed and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Is Cosmopolitanism Not For Women?:Migration in Qurratulain Hyder's Sita Betrayed and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines Ania Spyra (bio) When I was young I used to dream . . . of peeling off my skin plantain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh1 The inexorable prisons of color, race, and clan that Salman Rushdie evokes here, when peeled off in a hopeful reverie, leave the eponymous character of The Moor's Last Sigh as a free-floating physical body, comfortable in a world of apparent sameness. Realizing, however, that shedding the skin stands only at the very beginning of a long process of de-differentiation, Moor adds that his dream has its extension in another vision, this time one of becoming "simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world."2 Consequently, to ease his presence and mobility in the world, Moor wants to shake off first differences inherent to the body, and then the body itself. Although seemingly growing out of an idealism that strives for universal equality, the outlook endorsed by such a vision evokes the Enlightenment ideal of the disembodied mind as constitutive of a public sphere consisting of free, reasoning individuals.3 Additionally, because it seems impossible now to unwed the Enlightenment from the imperialist project that underpinned it, it becomes clear that the ideas that gave rise to universalism underlie also the notion of the cosmopolitan: the same "person"—generic and genderless citizen—is to be at home in the world.4 Such a universalist position has already been interrogated by many cultural critics, who revealed its specificity to a very limited group of men. Also Rushdie clearly realizes the limitations of this stance and has his character mourn that "in the waking world a man's not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be." Moor acknowledges that, beside his parents and history, [End Page 1] his "own black skin" constitutes one of the unshakeable burdens, a mark of difference that bars him from the universal masculine body.5 What Rushdie does not mention, however, is how women fit into this model, or rather how they do not. Clearly, if you peel off only the skin, the body you are left with still bears gender distinctions; and it is on these differences, as some feminists claim, that women's position in a society is based.6 Nor can women as easily dream of peeling away their body in its entirety, because their value usually is predicated on that body, which means for their group of belonging more than just ligaments and ganglions, more even than the reproductive organs as such. As I show in this essay, the symbolic meaning invested in their bodies extends far beyond corporeality, and it is these symbolic burdens that make it difficult for a woman to be a cosmopolite. However, because cosmopolitanism hints at a freedom of movement and change and thus an ability to escape containment, because it connotes volitional belonging to many places at the same time while upholding the possibility of a single human community, I would like to believe that women, who in the globalizing world constitute a large group among all the people displaced by historical events, economic migrations, or education, are not excluded from the cosmopolitan ideal. Recovering the term cosmopolitanism for feminist uses would imply freeing the body from weighty inscriptions, rather than freeing the subject from the body itself. Also the recent recuperations of cosmopolitanism, which see it as worth holding onto because of the responsibility for a shift in the unequal distribution of power that an emotional investment in a global community promises, stress the importance of working through—rather than erasing—the differences inherent in human bodies while constructing a cosmopolitan community.7 To interrogate the limitations of disembodied cosmopolitanism when applied to an ex-colonial woman of color, even if moneyed and upper-middle-class, I turn here to two South Asian texts that depict bourgeois women...

Turn on Your Computer and Simulate the Future!

The imaginative novelist is entitled to remake the existing world or present possible future worlds. Thus Anthony Burgess, in his illuminating Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on The Novel, claimed the right of his fellow novelists to transcend the real and present world.

Prolegomena to the History of Israel, with a reprint of the article "Israel" from the Encyclopaedia Britannica

Prolegomena to the History of Israel, with a reprint of the article "Israel" from the Encyclopaedia Britannica

MONEY AND BANKING IN SEARCH EQUILIBRIUM*

We develop a new theory of money and banking based on the old story in which goldsmiths start accepting deposits for safe keeping, then their liabilities begin circulating as media of exchange, then they begin making loans. We first discuss the history. We then present a model where agents can open bank accounts and write checks. The equilibrium means of payment may be cash, checks, or both. Sometimes multiple equilibria exist. Introducing banks increases the set of parameters for which money is valued–thus, money and banking are complements. We also derive a microfounded version of the usual money multiplier.

SELLEY, R. C., COCKS. L. R. M. & PLIMER, I. R. (eds) 2004. Encyclopedia of Geology (5 volumes), Volume 1: xxxvii+594 pp; Volume 2: xxxvii+545 pp.; Volume 3: xxxvii+659 pp.; Volume 4: xxxvii+692 pp.; Volume 5: xxxvii+807 pp. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Price (set) £775.00, US $1200.00 (hard covers). ISBN (set) 0 12 636380 3

Not since the institution of encyclopedias such as the late 19th century British editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica have so many experts (some 320) collaborated to produce such an extensive and authoritative collection of essays (some 340) on every aspect of geology from Africa to weathering. One might question why anyone would want to try and produce such a lavish set of books in this day and age when so much information is available to most students of geology on the internet? Even Dan McKenzie confesses in his foreword that he has ‘become addicted to using the Internet as my general encyclopedia’ but quickly adds that he will also ‘be delighted to be able to access something concerned with my own field that is as organised and scholarly as these volumes’. A glance at the price of these monumental volumes shows that the publishers cannot be expecting too many individual subscribers but rather are aiming at earth science institutions and their libraries. Even here the cost could burn up a fair bit of annual expenditure in one go. However, the publishers also say that the encyclopedia will be available online via ScienceDirect as of 2005. From this readers should be able to browse the whole work ‘using extensive internal cross-referencing and dynamic …

The emperor's new anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphism--the attribution to nonhuman species of human mental qualities--originated in the search for psychological continuity between species following the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Eclipsed by Behaviorism and classical ethology, mentalistic has undergone a r Skinner's reasons for rejecting remain valid today. Mentalistic explanations involve explanatory fictions, they imply a mental homunculus, they rely on introspection, and they are not parsimonious. Thoug y branch of science, to use folk psychological notions of human psychology in attempting to understand animal behavior cannot be constructive. Key words: Anthropomorphism, mentalism, behaviorism ********** use of the word Anthropomorphism to describe the ascription of human qualities to nonhuman species is a product of the Darwinian revolution. original sense of this word (and still the only one listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 2005) is the attribution of human form to a deity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), the extension of the word to animals is due to George Henry Lewes in his 1858 book, Seaside Studies. Lewes, believing that mollusks have eyes but only a rudimentary sensitivity to light, wrote that, we speak large latitude of when we speak of the 'vision' of these animals. (Lewes, 1862, p. 359.) Lewes' book was first published the year before Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Lewes and Darwin were acquainted each other, and clearly it was Darwin's emphasis on psychological continuity between humans and other species, especially as developed in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Men (1872) that created a niche for the use of in this new sense. Though Darwin wrote that there was fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental (Darwin, 1882, p. 66) he never used the term in his published writings. It was his protege, George Romanes, who gave the term wider currency by making inverted anthropomorphism his method in, Animal Intelligence (1884). ... Just as the theologians tell us--and logically enough--that if there is a Divine Mind, the best, and indeed only, conception we can form of it is that which is formed on the analogy, however imperfect, supplied by the human mind; so 'inverted anthropomorphism' we must apply a similar consideration a similar conclusion to the animal mind. mental states of an insect may be widely different from those of a man, and yet most probably the nearest conception that we can form of their true nature is that which we form by assimilating them to the pattern of the only mental states which we are actually acquainted. (Romanes, 1884, p. 10). Skinner (1938) would later write that it was Conway Lloyd Morgan who, with his law of parsimony, dispensed [mental faculties in animals] in a reasonably successful attempt to account for characteristic animal behavior without them. (1938, p. 4). However, Skinner's characterization of Morgan's Canon (or basal principle as he called it, 1894, p. 53) was substantially in error. Morgan's intent was not in any way to banish mentalistic explanation from the study of animal psychology. His 1894 work, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology commences fulsome praise of the recently deceased Romanes. Morgan's argument was not Romanes' anthropomorphic method--the method of inferring animal mentation by analogy human mental life. Morgan's only concern was that the interpretation be constrained by some principles of parsimony. his oft-quoted maxim, Morgan stated; In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale. …

Letters from Egypt

Various sources, including the BBC's weather Web site,[1][1] the Encyclopedia Britannica [2][2] and 2 dictionaries (one in English[3][3] and the other a standard Arab–English work[4][4]) all attribute the origin of the word “khamsin” to the Arabic term for “fifty.” This approximates the

Mining massive document collections by the WEBSOM method

A viable alternative to the traditional text-mining methods is the WEBSOM, a software system based on the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) principle. Prior to the searching or browsing operations, this method orders a collection of textual items, say, documents according to their contents, and maps them onto a regular two-dimensional array of map units. Documents that are similar on the basis of their whole contents will be mapped to the same or neighboring map units, and at each unit there exist links to the document database. Thus, while the searching can be started by locating those documents that match best with the search expression, further relevant search results can be found on the basis of the pointers stored at the same or neighboring map units, even if they did not match the search criterion exactly. This work contains an overview to the WEBSOM method and its performance, and as a special application, the WEBSOM map of the texts of Encyclopaedia Britannica is described.

Planning theory: reconstruction or requiem for planning?

In spite of the geometric progression in the quantity of scholars who have devoted themselves—more or less totally—to theoretical reflections about planning, both as a practice and as an academic d...

Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel (review)

Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 257 pp. $29.95 For decades North American Jews have known intuitively that the Christian Churches have been pro-Palestinian. They have to read the daily newspaper or listen to the news to discern Christian attitudes towards Israel. Paul Charles Merkley, history professor emeritus of Carlton University, set out to examine these attitudes terms of their causes and implications. Merkley makes it clear that Jews should not paint Christian attitudes toward with a wide brush. His analysis begins with the basic premise that early the post-World War II period Western nations recognized that the establishment of a Jewish state was more appealing than the alternative: the absorption of several hundred thousand homeless Jews into their own lands (pp. 4, 139-40, 162). Later, that demonstrated sufficient strength and determination to survive amidst overwhelmingly hostile forces seemed to be a major motivating factor the attitudinal change mainstream Christianity (pp. 38, 162-63). Another motivating factor had to do with the Christian missionary effort. Whereas Christian missionaries failed to convert Jews the Holy Land, their far greater success proselytizing among the Arabs led mainstream Churches to their first commitment to friends and clients the world, some instances refusing even to acknowledge the existence of the State of (p. 55, 196). A third motivating factor is the anti-establishment perspective of the Eastern Churches. is seen as a symbol of Western capitalist imperialism. For the Middle Eastern Churches the delegitimation of is a delegitimation of the capitalistic imperialism of the West itself (p. 121). The motive for the Middle Eastern Churches' anti-Zionism, Merkley suggests, is two-fold: a Judaeophobia that goes back to the pre-Islamic period, when both Jews and Oriental Christians lived submission under Byzantium Christians; and the theology fundamental to both Orthodox and Oriental Churches of supersessionism, which the Church is heir to all promises God made to Abraham. These, along with the argument that Palestinians are the aboriginal inhabitants, make for an airtight case against the legitimacy of the State of Israel (p. 120). As a result, when North American bishops, moderators, and Christian leaders rerum from in-depth tours led by the MECC, they report on the wickedness of the Zionists and their sinful oppression of Christians and Muslims the Holy Land (p. 121). Why, asks Merkley, does the question of legitimacy occur only respect to Israel, never with respect to the scores of other nations that have come into the world since 1948 (p. 217)? Why does the UN Human Rights Commission, almost every session, denounce violations of human rights Israel, never ongoing human rights violations countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan? In his informative chapter on the Merkley examines the name and the early history of the land now called Israel. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as a term conventionally used as a name for the territory which, the Old Testament, is claimed as the of the pre-exilic Jews... It was understood the deliberations leading up to the Balfour Declaration that a Jewish homeland would be in some part of what has always been defined as that part of the world where Jews once had their inheritance (italics the original, p. 94). Palestinians, until the 1960s, generally meant the Jewish residents of Palestine; none of the other communities the area were called or called themselves Palestinians. They were Arabs. In the 1940s and 1950s the various opposing lobbies spoke to the Arab rights Palestine (p. 95). Selecting the name to replace Judaea and Samaria was an ancient Roman attempt to insult the Jews by memorializing the long-vanished Philistines. …

Type/Face

Type/Face

Introduction: American Literary Globalism?

From Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature ... , 3rd ed., vol. 7 (Edinburgh: A. Bell and C. MacFarquhar, 1797), 656. Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections; Washington State University. INTRODUCTION American Literary Globalism? LAWRENCE BUELL So just what is this space we are calling "Arneriean literary globalism."? As the push to internationalize Am.erican literary and cultural studies has intensified, the agendas seem. to blur together, and all the m.ore so when the occasions are sym.posia rather than single-authored interventions. The sam.e year of the 2003 Yale conference at which draft versions of m.ost of the following essays were presented saw the birth of the new journal Comparative American Studies, avowedly in response to "a widely perceived need within the academ.ic com.m.unity to reposition the study of America hem.ispherically and internationally ." Earlier that sam.e year, PMLA featured a special issue titled "Am.erica: The Idea, the Literature," whose editor insists on the necessity of "a com.parative and relational refocusing of Am.erica in the larger world context" if Americanists "are to be anything lnore than sym.ptom.atic: echoes ofAm.erica's official, nationalist m.ythology. "I Indeed a num.ber ofthe contributors to both projects, and this one as well, have been calling for years for a "postnational" or "post--Am.erican" studies. Since Septem.ber II, 2001, these calls have increased in reaction to the resurgence of nationalism. and unilateralism. in the United States, not only at the federal level but also at the grassroots. But opposition to governm.ental policy and the perceived tide of national feeling is by no m.eans their only m.otive . Behind the push for the study ofAmerica to proceed m.ore post- or internationally are other convictions too: that nation -specific inquiry is increasingly problem.atic in an age of ESQ ! v. 50 !lST-3RD QUARTERS! 2004 1 LAWRENCE BUELL increasing international entanglements; that AInerican studies ' traditional nation-focusedness has uncritically reinforced a posture of U.S. exceptionalism even and indeed perhaps especially when dissent from mainstream AInerican values has been basic to the critical orientation; and that Axnerican studies has been monopolized by NorthAInerican and particularly U.S.-based specialists. These are least are some of the motives. I don't pretend to supply a complete list. Meanwhile, this energy on behalfofmovingAInerican studies away from a single-nation focus has produced a great deal of confusion and internal bickering as well as broad assent. Even the most basic terms are in dispute, as seen especially in the debates within the AInerican Studies Association about whether to change its name, and if so to what.2 When it comes to thinking more specifically about how "the culture of the United States is positioned within a framework ofbroader global affairs": although this gathering takes "globalism" as its umbrella term, it's clear that some find "the discourse of globalization " too "vague and hypothetical," preferring what is claimed to be the greater specificity of "transnationalism," naming "various points of intersection, whether actual border territories or other kinds of disputed dornain, where cultural conflict is lived out experientially." Yet the essay in the same collection that im.mediately follows the one just quoted objects that "transnational" is in some contexts employed "to cross national borders intellectually and abstractly without disturbing them"-and proposes the more deliberately paradoxical "postnational" as a better rubric for the "'utopian" project of getting beyond the confines of the national.3 Altogether, a handful of ornnibus terms are in play, each ofwhich is ITlade to bear variously interpreted sets of connotations that threaten to produce more noise and static than clarification, and none of which is likely to win acceptance as canonical. And understandably . After all, canonicity is part of what this criticism is trying to get beyond. Under such circumstances it seems rnore than ordinarily important to resist the chronic temptation of introductory salvos to engage in manifesto discourse. The temptation is all the harder to resist given that the tide of critical energy in this area 2 AMERICAN UTERARY GLOBAUSM? is so obviously on the rise. But wrangling over what already contested...

When Pope Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his Forged Antiquities

In one of his short stories, Jorge Luís Borges imagines that an article describing an imaginary Middle Eastern country finds its way into certain copies of a pirated edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The investigation of this anomaly eventually leads the narrator to discover another encyclopedia,

Language, Suffering, and the Question of Immanence: Toward a Respectful Phenomenological Psychopathology

AbstractThis paper explores the status of language and suffering in recovery from psychosis from a transcendentally-informed phenomenological perspective. We suggest that each of these concepts can apply both to the illness itself and to the person with the illness. The relationship between the two will be one focus of this discussion. The other focus will be on the various ways in which phenomenological approaches to psychopathology have understood the nature of this relationship; a relationship characterized by different meanings of the term "immanence." Drawing inspiration from a Borges poem and from Husserl's debate with Heidegger over the content of his "Phenomenology" article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, we argue that it is misleading, as well as unhelpful, to continue to focus on deficits and dysfunction while ignoring the person's hopes, strengths, assets, and agency. As long as there remains no cure for psychosis, we conclude that it is more effective to promote recovery among people with psychosis than to remain focused on reducing, minimizing, or eliminating their disorder.

Comparison of the different electronic versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: a usability study

Over the years, Encyclopaedia Britannica has undergone a number of revisions and has been provided in a number of formats other than print. The different electronic formats include a CD‐ROM version, a subscription online version, a free online version that was recently changed to a subscription version, and a DVD‐ROM version. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the different electronic versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The objectives of this study were to find out if one of the electronic versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is easier to use than the others, to see if the users are satisfied with the information that they retrieved from each version, and to see if the users retrieve the same information from each version. Over one third (six) of 15 participants thought that britannica.com was the easiest to use. The main reason mentioned was the set‐up of the initial results screen. Most of the participants felt that all of the databases answered the searches sufficiently and nine participants felt that britannica.com answered the searches the best. The main reason mentioned was the variety of information sources provided on the search results page (Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, magazine articles, Web sites, and books). Seven of the participants were satisfied with using all of the databases.