Essay Of Mine Research Articles

Reconsidering a Lexical Test of Arden of Faversham: A Response to a Critique

ABSTRACTThis article is a response to a critique by Pervez Rizvi of an essay of mine entitled “A Supplementary Lexical Test for Arden of Faversham”, which employed a few high-quality lexical markers that are used much more often, or much less often, by Shakespeare than by a large control group of early modern dramatists, to support the view that Shakespeare was largely responsible for the central act of Arden. Rizvi drew on my essay to make certain sound points, notably that results for mere acts or groups of scenes cannot validly be mixed with results for whole plays, and that when one relies on only a small number of marker words the outcome can turn on the presence or absence of only one or two instances. Rizvi divided plays into 4657-word segments – the same length as Arden of Faversham, 4–9 – and noted that, when my method was applied to them, some Shakespeare segments yielded very low scores and some non-Shakespeare segments yielded very high scores. My response aims to counter some of Rizvi’s strictures, clarify my assumptions and procedures, and show that the new data that he has generously supplied strengthen, rather than weaken, my original argument.

Conventionalism defended: a reply to Moore

ABSTRACTIn a recent article in this Journal, Eric Moore criticized an earlier essay of mine published in this same Journal on two fronts. On the first, he criticized my criticisms of broad internalism for relying on abstract moral principles too far removed from the practice of sport to adjudicate normative conflicts in which disputants cannot agree on what is the purpose of sport. On the second front, he criticized my reliance on what he called Rorty’s “controversial” views of truth and rationality to back up my criticisms of broad internalism. I find both criticisms forceful but not persuasive. In my reply, therefore, I defend both use of Rorty’s and other similar historicist takes on rational justification and my criticisms of broad internalism principles-based approach to normative inquiry in sport.

The Neo-Molinist Square Stands Firm

In a previous issue of Philosophia Christi, Kirk MacGregor responded to an essay of mine in which I argued for a neo-Molinist account of open theism. The argument demonstrated how, given standard counterfactual semantics, one could derive an “open future square of opposition,” that is, a depiction of the logical relations that hold between future-tense statements from an open theistic standpoint. Conceding the validity of the argument, MacGregor nevertheless sought to deny its soundness by criticizing both its conclusion and the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics on which the argument was based. In this paper, I argue that MacGregor’s reasons for rejecting the open future square, as well as his Molinist alternative to the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics, are uncompelling.

The IPE of money revisited

ABSTRACTSome two decades after an earlier review essay of mine, the time seems ripe to revisit the international political economy (IPE) of money. How has the study of money evolved in more recent years, and what is the understanding of international monetary politics today? The main message of this essay is – to be blunt – disappointment. Research has become increasingly insular and introspective, largely detached from what goes on in the real world. Two parallel developments are responsible, both reflective of wider trends in mainstream IPE. First is a steep decline of interest in broader systemic issues, as the pendulum has swung sharply toward the domestic level of analysis. And second is a marked loss of interest in practical policy solutions. In lieu of worries about problems to be solved, scholarship today tends to be driven more by curiosity about puzzles to be explained. The roots of these twin developments trace back, above all, to the framing effect of epistemology – the demanding methodological standards that mainstream IPE has set for itself. The fault lies, first and foremost, with the excessive priority given to formal scientific method.

Paula Hyman and the Engendering of Modern Jewish History: A Defining Scholarly Life

MARION A. KAPLAN AND DEBORAH DASH MOORE, EDS. Gender and Jewish History. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. viii + 416.HASIA R. DINER, SHIRA KOHN, AND RACHEL KRANSON, EDS. A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 269.RIV- ELLEN PRELL, ED. Women Remaking American Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 331.In 1976, TWO GRADUATE STUDENTS and a returning B.A. student published The Jewish Woman in America. } The book was a call to activism that reverberated through the halls of academe and the pews of synagogue life. As Paula Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michel knew, theirs was not the first book about Jewish women, but was the first to weave together critical scholarship and feminist scholarship. Today, when I scan my bookshelf, I can see the impact of The Jewish Woman in America in monographs and anthologies that address women, gender, and modern Jewish history. Indeed, over the last five years, four of the most prominent scholars on modern Jewish life have edited volumes on the topic: Deborah Dash Moore, Marion Kaplan, Hasia Diner (along with Shira Kohn and Rachel Kranson, Diner's graduate students at the time), and Riv-Ellen Prell. in this historical moment do we find ourselves with such a wealth of scholarship about Jewish women and gender? And what can these three books tell us about the contours of the fields of gender studies and Jewish studies, how they have changed since 1976, and where they might be going? (For the sake of full disclosure, an essay of mine appears in Gender and Jewish History, and I have published a review of A Jewish Feminist Mystique? elsewhere.2)In significant ways, these three anthologies have very different aims. Prell 's Women Remaking Judaism examines the intersection of Judaism and feminism and asks, as Prell writes in her lucid introduction, Why Jewish women who embraced Jewish feminism stayed within a system that they believed oppressed them to transform rather than leave it (p. 4). Weaving together literary studies, anthropology, theology, history, and ritual studies, the book argues that the power of feminism came less from its radical break with tradition and more from its ability to work from within tradition and use new interpretations of history to validate feminist claims.Discussions about Judaism may filter into the other two volumes, Gender and Jewish History and A Jewish Feminine Mystique?, but these books ground themselves in politics and culture. Even so, their aims diverge. Gender and Jewish History documents the accomplishments within a field of study. The editors argue that concomitant with the acceptance of Jewish history in the academy was an investment in chronicling women's experiences, sexuality, and gender relations. The volume travels through time and space to show just how powerfully gender scholarship has shaped the field of Jewish history. In contrast, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? is an attempt to create a new field of analysis. In their provocative introduction, Diner, Kohn, and Kranson write that the standard interpretation of the postwar period in the United States as one of a return to patriarchal gender norms and a period of cultural and political complacency is woefully incomplete. The point of the volume, then, is to bring a new historical interpretation to light through a series of essays, all concentrated on the same time period and same country.When comparing the table of contents, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? includes a greater proportion of newer scholars and one gets from this book a sense of freshness and, in the case of a few essays, rawness. Gender and Jewish History includes essays from the most prominent Jewish historians, many of whom are revisiting topics they have studied in earlier works or taking the opportunity to ask broad historiographie questions, such as the role that gender plays in Holocaust studies. …

The Post-Zionist Condition

1 In the summer of 1991, the first issue of the Israeli journal Teoria Ubikoret (Theory and Criticism) published an essay of mine on Anton Shammas, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who wrote the Hebrew novel Arabeskot (Arabesques).1 In this essay I traced Shammas’s subversion of the Jewish ethnocentrism of the Hebrew literary canon.2 Shammas’s novel reveals how the Hebrew canon in Israel, in the guise of the apparently neutral term Hebrew Literature, which only apparently bases itself on the Hebrew language as the common literary language of Jews and Arabs, has in fact imposed an exclusionary policy. That is, in order to enter its realm, those who write in Hebrew must be Jewish. Shammas, I argued, sought to de-Judaize the Hebrew language and turn it into a language shared by all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike. Now, twenty years later, Teoria Ubikoret has published a different essay of mine, this time on Tuvya haholev (Tuvya the Dairyman), Dan Miron’s Hebrew translation of the great Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem’s novel Tevye der Milhiker. I claim that while Miron’s Hebrew indeed Hebraicizes Aleichem’s Yiddish, it also moves in the opposite direction; it Yiddishizes Hebrew, giving Yiddish a prominent presence in the Hebrew translation and thus decentering Israeli subjectivity and undermining the cohesive force of Hebrew.3 These essays span two decades. The first article was nourished by the utopian assumption that the existence of the Israeli state meant that its national identity would be Israeli, while the second was written after this hope had been smashed to smithereens. And so, instead of the reterritori-

In Defense of Secularizing Whitehead

This essay responds to Lewis Ford’s “Allan’s Atheism,” in which he assesses a recent essay of mine that finds God an unnecessary and indeed coherence-destroying addition to Process and Reality . I clarify my position by showing how Whitehead’s notions of physical purpose and aesthetic determination adequately account for the novelty required for an actual occasion’s concrescence and for increases in achieved value. I then criticize Ford’s claim that genuine novelties must have a divine origin and that in Adventures of Ideas the Eros of the Universe refers to God.

In defense of "the Religion school": A response to Anthony J. Blasi

Anthony Blasi (1995) argues that many scholars of religious studies misconstrue sociology of religion, if not whole social scientific study of religion. So zealous are these scholars to reject an apologetical, nonreductive approach to religion that they fail to recognize an approach to religion that is nonreductive yet nonapologetical: approach of interpretive sociology of religion, as represented by symbolic interactionist school of sociology. The scholars Blasi most castigates are members of what he labels the Religion school of thought. Because he cites but two persons in his essay- Thomas Ryba and me - it is hard to see on what basis he claims that this school even exists. Two citations do not a school make. Moreover, essay of mine which he cites never even appeared in Religion, and Ryba's essay, which did appear in Religion, is only a long, and by no means uncritical, review of a book of mine. I will, then, forgo discussing four planks of Religion school's credo that Blasi extricates from what is really Ryba's summary, not endorsement, of my own position. Instead, I will focus on three kindred issues that Blasi discusses most fully: interpretation versus explanation, empirical versus nonempirical, and explaining versus explaining away.

In defense of "the Religion school": A response to Anthony J. Blasi

AbstractAnthony Blasi (1995) argues that many scholars of religious studies misconstrue the sociology of religion, if not the whole social scientific study of religion. So zealous are these scholars to reject an apologetical, nonreductive approach to religion that they fail to recognize an approach to religion that is nonreductive yet nonapologetical: the approach of interpretive sociology of religion, as represented by the symbolic interactionist school of sociology. The scholars Blasi most castigates are the members of what he labels "the Religion school of thought". Because he cites but two persons in his essay- Thomas Ryba and me - it is hard to see on what basis he claims that this school even exists. Two citations do not a school make. Moreover, the essay of mine which he cites never even appeared in Religion, and Ryba's essay, which did appear in Religion, is only a long, and by no means uncritical, review of a book of mine. I will, then, forgo discussing the four planks of the Religion school's credo that Blasi extricates from what is really Ryba's summary, not endorsement, of my own position. Instead, I will focus on the three kindred issues that Blasi discusses most fully: interpretation versus explanation, empirical versus nonempirical, and explaining versus explaining away.

Who now speaks for Weber? A response to Burger

Professor Burger approves of the other two books he reviewed, while sternly opposing mine on multiple grounds. This is intriguing, since a blurb I wrote endorsed Scaff's book when it appeared, and a long complimentary essay of mine about Goldman's book was published in Telos nearly four years ago. So if we agree about little else, Burger and I concur that the other two books he was asked to evaluate are worthy additions to "Mt. Weber." Yet we stand in obstinate disagreement about the value of my undertaking, my view of Weber's theoretical labors, and about what should now be done with his ideas in a time when Marx and

A MELUS Interview: Paule Marshall

following interview was conducted in Ms. Marshall's apartment living room in Richmond, VA, May 28, 1990. room is tastefully appointed with no excesses, like Ms. Marshall's fiction. One wall is lined with burnished wood shelves filled with books and art objects; on the opposite wall hangs an oil portrait of the wistful girl who appears on the cover of Brown Girl, Brownstones. Ms. Marshall smiles comfortably and talks warmly as she tells about her life's work; she relates information about conceiving and writing Brown Girl (1959) with a freshness that belies how long ago her first novel was published. One gets the singular impression that the ideas and plans for all of her fiction, retained or discarded, remain vibrantly alive in her thinking and imagination to animate her conversation as she recalls planning and researching content or selecting concepts and images to covey her ideas. fiction of Paule Marshall - Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961); Chosen Place, Timeless People (1969); Reena and Other Stories (1983); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); and Daughters (1991) - is distinct in African American literary tradition for its attentiveness to the necessity of cultural continuity for blacks of the African Diaspora. Ms. Marshall's rare vision encompasses the impact of the peculiar history of people of African descent and discerns that a spiritual return to their source represents their best chance for survival. Interviewer: There are very clear pictures of the Caribbean in your fiction. Would you talk about its importance to you and to your work? Marshall: Well I think the importance of the West Indies in the work started even before my first visit which took place when I was nine years old. It predates that because as I quoted in that essay of mine, The Poets in the Kitchen, one of the things that was talked a lot about among the women was the whole nostalgic memory of home as they called it, home. It was very early on that I had a sense of a very distinct difference between home, which had to do with the West Indies, and this country which had to do with the United States. For a while it was a little confusing because to me home was Brooklyn and by extension America, and yet there always was this very strong sense in the household of this other place that was also home. I think that it began then, an interest in this place that was so important to these women and that I began to sense it was important in whomever I was going to discover myself to be. So when I started thinking about such weighty topics, not until much, much later in my life, twenties or so, the other home seemed important to me in order to answer certain questions about myself. Really in a sense that's what the work is primarily about; it's my trying to find answers I'm always putting to myself. Interviewer: Were you aware of intraracial conflict growing up in Brooklyn? That theme is minimally present in Brown Girl, Brownstones. Marshall: I was made aware of the fact that I certainly was Afro-American growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, and at the same time there was this other component, this other very strong dimension which was Afro-West Indian. I didn't see any contradiction or difference or problem with the two until I was made aware of some of the conflicts between the two groups. This was very painful for me because I saw myself belonging to both. A conflict would almost suggest that there were parts of myself that were in conflict with each other. Then to reinforce the whole West Indian aspect there was the trip that my mother took us on when I was nine and my sister was thirteen to visit our Grandmother in Barbados. My mother had come into some money from a brother of hers who worked at the Panama Canal; and he had died there, as so many of those men from the West Indies working in the swamps and jungles of Panama didn't make it out. …

The Limited Constitutional Convention: The Recurring Answer

Recently, this Journal carried a very brief essay of mine on amending the Constitution.' Immediately thereafter, Professor Dellinger published a more elaborate article in the Yale Law Journal on the same subject.2 His article is a welcome addition to the growing literature in this area.3 More amply documented than my original informal essay, his article also appears to reach quite different conclusions. Our differences are not so great, however, nor the basis of disagreement so abstruse, that they cannot be addressed in published correspondence rather than in a full-length reply. I write to share how I think he may have drawn some unwarranted inferences from the materials he has

If All Are Not Saved, What Good Is the Salvation of One Only?

In Antioch Review (Fall, 1960), James H. Justus published an essay, A New Liberalism to Pay Old Debts, commenting on an essay of mine, Intellectuals and American Democracy, which appeared in Antioch Review in summer of 1959. Justus' comments were stimulating, and they were provocative in best sense. Justus took issue with me on a number of questions, and on several of these went ahead to argue counter propositions of his own. I wish to take this opportunity to clarify some of my views and to make some observations about his. Actually, views of Justus and myself are not so far apart as this running discussion might seem to indicate, for it is in nature of polemical give-and-take to emphasize areas of disagreement and to assume more or less areas of agreement. Today, in our open society, sophisticated conservatives no longer damn liberal tradition as heresy; but they have other ways of denigrating it. They accuse it of being naive, superficial, and callow, of misunderstanding the nature of man and the human situation, of underrating non-rational, of ignoring basic continuities of history and social life. They tend, too, as I wrote in my original article, to appropriate for conservatism whole humanistic tradition of Western world, whereas, of course, that tradition has become a part, in somewhat varying ways, of Western reaction, conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and socialism. In all fairness: An awareness of tradition, of interplay of rational and non-rational, and of continuities of history is not so much a matter of conservatism or liberalism as it is of political and social maturity. Justus writes: Mr. Carleton implies that America suddenly sprang into being in 1780 or thereabout and that Age of Reason is largely responsible for American character. I implied no such thing.

The Greek Acrophonic Numerals

In 1913 an essay of mine appeared in the JHS (XXXIII 27 ff.) entitled ‘Three Greek Numeral Systems.’ Shortly afterwards I published in this Annual (XVIII 98 ff.) an article on ‘The Greek Numeral Notation,’ in which I collected and summarised the available evidence for all the numeral systems of the acrophonic type used among the Greeks and set forth the main conclusions to which that evidence pointed. In a later volume (XXVIII 141 ff.) I added some ‘Further Notes on the Greek Acrophonic Numerals,’ recording the examples which had accumulated since the publication of my previous article and giving a new and fuller edition of an important text from a site near Andania in Messenia (IG V 1. 1532). No further discussion of the subject has appeared and scholars have repeatedly cited my articles as giving the fullest and most recent treatment of it.

More about Books for Students

COL. Luxmoore Newcombe has been kind enough to comment on my remarks as to the policy, in at least one county library, of buying cheap books, leaving the supply of more expensive books to the Central Library for Students. When I began to contribute these notes at the invitation of my friend the Editor, I hardly thought any essay of mine would raise a question of high policy. But that has happened! On thinking over the matter it seems to me that the policy is of considerable domestic interest, and so I boldly proffer again my own local point of view and look for such support as I think I should get.

V Some Problems in Ancient Indian History IV.—The Identity of Yasodharman and Vikramāditya, and some Corollaries

The journal for 1903, pp. 545 ff., contained an essay of mine discussing the problem of Yaśodharman-Vishnuvardhana. In the meantime, 1908, Mr. Vincent A. Smith's valuable Early History of India has appeared in a second edition. As it offers an entirely different solution of the problem, it appears to me desirable to reconsider the evidences bearing on its solution.

III.—On Bird and Beast in Ancient Symbolism

The following essay, except for one or two slight corrections and additions which I have since interpolated, was read before the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh in June 1894. Very shortly thereafter, M. Jean Svoronos published in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique (Janv.–Juillet, 1894) a learned paper “Sur la signification des types monétaires des anciens,” in which he demonstrated with an elaborate wealth of illustration the astronomic significance of many coin-types, the precise point that the greater part of this essay of mine was written to prove. Beginning with coins on which a beast- or bird-emblem is figured together with the symbol of a star, and passing on to others where the star-symbol is omitted, M. Svoronos shows clearly that in a very varied series of coin-types, the Lion, the Bull, the Eagle, the Horse, and so forth, represent not merely these creatures themselves, but their stellar namesakes: in short, that, in more or less obscure and occult shapes, astronomic emblems are imprinted on a vast range of ancient coins, just as in open and acknowledged forms they are visible, for instance, on the coins of Antoninus Pius. So clearly is all this put forward by M. Svoronos that my paper might well have remained unpublished were it not that I think I take the case somewhat further than he does. For, whereas M. Svoronos is content to demonstrate the symbols of individual constellations, I have attempted also in certain cases to show that the associated emblems correspond to the positions relative to one another of the heavenly bodies, in some cases to the configuration of the sky at critical periods of the year or at the festival seasons of the cities to which the coins belong. In some other respects, also, I have attempted to carry to a further issue the general considerations suggested by the astronomic hypothesis.

Fossil Floras of the Arctic Regions

THE author of the valuable paper communicated in NATURE, vol xix. p. 124, on “The Fossil Floras of the Arctic Regions”, will find in an essay of mine, entitled “Thalassa”, and published in the course of last year, a number of facts and arguments in corroboration of his views regarding the influence of oceanic currents upon climate. In this essay, which is mainly founded upon the observations made on board H.M.S. Challenger, I have endeavoured to show how a relatively trifling elevation or depression of the sea-coast or of the bed of the ocean may considerably alter the configuration of an oceanic basin; how such an alteration must affect the direction, volume and temperature of existing currents, and thus have a tendency to change the climate and ultimately the distribution of animal and plant life in the regions bordering on the oceanic basin. I also (p. 29–30) ventured to express the opinion that “it appears hardly necessary to go in search of vast cosmic changes, such as an alteration in the position of the terrestrial axis, a diminution in the amount of solar heat … while we have, close at hand, an agency whose effect upon climatic conditions may be said to be a matter of daily experience, and which is sufficiently powerful to establish, in almost any region on the earth's surface, the small difference of temperature which is a decree of life or of death to numerous animal and vegetable organisms”. To this I may now add, that the influence of oceanic currents upon climate and upon the distribution of life will be most felt and produce the most remarkable results in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, which, as we know, may at one period be swept by powerful polar currents, at another invaded by vast masses of warm water brought there by currents from the tropical regions, such, for example, as the Gulf Stream.

XIX. Sequel to an essay on the constitution of the atmosphere, published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1826; with some account of the sulphurets of lime

In an essay of mine on the constitution of the atmosphere, which was printed in the Transactions for 1826, I signified my intention of following it with a sequel of experiments to ascertain if possible which of the two views therein developed was most countenanced by facts. I now proceed to give an account of such investiga­tions relating to this subject as have engaged my attention during a long period of years. It may be needful to premise certain facts which are, I believe, universally ad­mitted as indisputable; namely, that the atmosphere consists principally of two elastic fluids, azote and oxygen, either mixed by some mechanical law, or otherwise com­bined by a chemical principle in proportion nearly as four parts of the former to one of the latter in volume; that the two elastic fluids may be obtained separately in a state of purity; that when thus obtained they may be mixed in all possible propor­tions; and that the aggregate volumes in such cases are just equal to the sum of the two volumes of the ingredients: also, that any body which has a chemical affinity for either of them so as to combine with it in a separate state, will also combine with it in the mixed state.