Evil Genius Research Articles

The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies by Donald Phillip Verene

Reviewed by: The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies by Donald Phillip Verene Jeffrey Dirk Wilson VERENE, Donald Phillip. The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2018. xii + 138 pp. Paper, $20.00 This book consists of a preface and introduction, in which Verene sets forth his own philosophy of literature, and then four chapters in which he applies his method to particular works of literature. In the preface, Verene explains that he means to investigate four different relationships of philosophy to literature. First, there is "literature as a kind of philosophy" in which the author asks the reader to think "both philosophically and poetically at the same time." El immortal of Jorge Luis Borges exemplifies this relationship "as the power of the word to embody thought." Like Vico, Borges confronts "us as readers with a style that we may call poetic learning." Granted that Vico is philosophical first and poetic second, while the relation is reversed for Borges, both can be read as refutation of Ockham's razor, for "fiction is always a doubling up," thus suspending the principle of noncontradiction since fiction makes it possible for us to "think the unthinkable," specifically in El immortal, immortality. Verene teases out an ethics of immortality by educating the memory in a way that comforts and guides us through the terror of our irreversible mortality. The second relationship is "philosophy of literature." The text is not intended philosophically and yet, also, the text can be fully comprehended only in relation to one or more philosophical works. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the focus here, a work to which Verene has dedicated two earlier books. Earlier in this work, Verene claims "sincerity" to be the [End Page 384] poison of both good writing and reading and that its antidote is irony, but this irony contributes to the philosopher's and poet's disturbing of the peace. Joyce expects the reader to laugh along with him (and wake him?) as he writes, thereby denying time, the devourer of us all, writer and reader alike. Finnegans Wake has no meaning; it is what it says, a speech ontologically and poetically complete, "a bolt of lightning" (Longinus) that illuminates the world perfectly, brilliantly, instantaneously before leaving us in complete darkness. The third relationship is "philosophy in literature" when "philosophical ideas reside" in a literary work. Throughout Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes!, "his sense of the joke" is never far from "his sense of human justice." Sandburg's poem is something of an origins' myth, concerned not with the creation of the world, rather with the creation of the people. Verene sees in Sandburg's "politics" something inimical to poetry and which the people should limit, thereby arriving at "the poetic politics of the people" in which "tradition" "that incorporates the wisdom of the ancestors" counteracts the "progress" of "technological society" in which self-knowledge and poetry are not possible, leaving the people without a language and defenseless against all-devouring time. The final relationship is when philosophy stands in dialectical counterpoint to literature, that is, "philosophy and literature." This occurs when philosophical and literary texts illuminate each other because "they are both concerned with the same theme but each takes it up differently." While Sebastian Brant's Das Narren Schyff is the announced work, in fact Verene reflects also on the Moriae encomium of Erasmus, Die verkehrte Welt of Ludwig Tieck, and other folly literature. Verene companions Hegel throughout this chapter and claims, in effect, that Descartes's evil genius replaces the fool, and deduction replaces folly, while Hegel restores the fool in his dialectic of opposites and bounding folly with decorum. Again, it is memory that comes to the rescue. Deduction can operate in a vacuum of forgetfulness, but folly remembers everything though upside-down and front-to-back. One has to remember everything with the fool in order to laugh with him. By providing catalyst to memory, the fool liberates the thinker from Cartesian deduction: laughter too can strike like lightning. Unlike deduction, neither laughter nor dialectic comes to a conclusion. A recurring theme with which Verene closes is the doubleness of things, especially of subjective knower and knowable...

The Totalitarian Creation in its Claim of Genius

Abstract Creation is a fundamental definition of genius, and we are wondering if those minds that created totalitarian systems, could remain in human history through destructive impact on millions of people’s minds, and could they possibly be included in genius category. Certainly, we could support the idea of the participation of these people in the creation process – in the creation of ideology of a new world, of a new Human etc. At the same time, the Real Human is perceived only as an object that can be manipulated, overwhelmed, dominated, controlled, destroyed etc., “love” and “investment” of the evil genius being dedicated to a non-existent Ideal Human. We are trying to understand what are the pillars of the relationship with the Others, and the dictators’ great seduction capacity. In the condition of the incapacity and inability of these personalities to appreciate humanity, most of them were able to provoke admiration. In the context of these paradoxical relations, becomes noticeable the responsibility of understanding the way perverse mind speaks with our minds in a way that we became available consciously or unconsciously to join in this destructive creation.

Elizabeth Severn: The “Evil Genius” of Psychoanalysis, by Arnold William Rachman, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 332pp and Confusion of Tongues: A Return to Sándor Ferenczi, by Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 186pp.

Elizabeth Severn: The “Evil Genius” of Psychoanalysis, by Arnold William Rachman, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 332pp and Confusion of Tongues: A Return to Sándor Ferenczi, by Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 186pp.

"PRIMORDIAL CHANT". SÁNDOR FERENCZI AS AN ORPHIC POET.

Ferenczi's deviations from Freudian thinking have caused enormous controversy. This paper re-examines Ferenczi's theoretical and technical innovations through the lens of Orpha-one of his most characteristic and valuable contributions, the culmination point of his thought, and the leitmotif of his work. So far research on Ferenczi's Orpha concept has been relatively sparse and there is still much obscurity about this term that he adopted from or co-created with his "evil genius" Elizabeth Severn. The following paper will attempt to shed more light on the origin, evolution, functions, and the philosophical foundations of the Orpha concept. Along with the theoretical, therapeutic and philosophical aspects, this point of view will enable a better understanding of the poetic value and the lyricism of Ferenczi's work. Orphic harmony-the fusion of Dionysian ecstasy and Apollonian clarity into the "principal instinct of tranquility" proclaimed by Ferenczi in 1930 and into the "primordial chant of cosmic unity" (Herder), emerges as the essence of the Ferenczian work and worldview.

Regulars - Columnist. Dear Evil Engineer, How can I cryogenically freeze my enemies to keep for future taunting?

Our resident evil engineer offers words of wisdom to a villain in need of some guidance from an evil genius.

SENECAN ‘META-STOICALITY’: IN THE COGNITIVE GRASP OF ATREUS

The first act ofThyestesis a challenge to the theory that the same Seneca wrote both thephilosophicaand the tragedies. We are compelled by the evil genius of Atreus and not by the common virtue of hisSatelles. Atreus not only feels no compunction at his words, but seems to hone his evil from the prodding. It is the death of philosophy, the anti-mirror of the prince: the tyrant is not reformed, but becomes more himself—more perfectly tyrannical. It is a performance of Socrates’ monster inRepublic9—the soul composed of a hydra of desires with its ring of heads constantly changing, a lion of anger and a small man, who is to domesticate the hydra like a farmer and befriend the lion (588c–589b). The ineffectualSatellesportrays the hopeless plight of Plato's ‘little man reason’ before a lion with monstrous desires like Atreus. There is a place left for philosophy to win over the tyrant only if theSatellesdoes not represent all that reason can do, and stands instead only for gentlemanly virtue or common sense, which lacks the kind oflogosneeded to control the beast.

Problem Solver or "Evil Genius": Thomas Jesse Jones and The Problem of Indian Administration

Problem Solver or "Evil Genius": Thomas Jesse Jones and The Problem of Indian Administration

VIII—Beliefs-in-a-Vat

The over-arching claim that I intend to defend in this paper is that while widespread ‘local’ error is conceivable, we cannot, in the end, make sense of the radical sceptical idea that all our perceptual beliefs might be false – that no one has, as it were, ever been in touch with an ‘external world’ at all. To this end, I will show that an asymmetry exists between ‘local’ and ‘global’ sceptical scenarios, such that the possibility of ‘local’ error does not imply that ‘global’ error must also be possible. Instead, we will see that what gives rise to the radical sceptical problem is an unquestioned acceptance of the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ (NET) – the notion that I and my ‘envatted’ counterpart share the same perceptual experiences, even though my benighted twin has never had any contact with an ‘external’ reality. Although most contemporary epistemologists take NET for granted, I will show that it cannot, ultimately, be rendered intelligible, and, consequently, that neither can the ‘global’ sceptical scenario that depends on it.

A Better Disjunctivist Response to the ‘New Evil Genius’ Challenge

This paper aims for a more robust epistemological disjunctivism (ed) by offering on its behalf a new and better response to the ‘new evil genius’ problem. The first section articulates the ‘new evil genius challenge’ (neg challenge) to ed, specifying its two components: the ‘first-order’ and ‘diagnostic’ problems for ed. The first-order problem challenges proponents of ed to offer some understanding of the intuition behind the thought that your radically deceived duplicate is no less justified than you are for adopting her perceptual beliefs. In the second section, the author argues that blamelessness explanations are inadequate to the task and offer better explanations in their place—that of ‘trait-level virtue’ and ‘reasonability’. The diagnostic problem challenges proponents of ed to explain why it is that classical internalists disagree with them about how to interpret new evil genius considerations. The proponent of ed owes some error theory. The author engages this problem in the third section, arguing that classical internalists are misled to overlook disjunctivist interpretations of new evil genius thinking owing to a mistaken commitment to a kind of ‘vindicatory’ explanation of proper perceptual belief.

La refutación cartesiana del escéptico y del ateo. Tres hitos de su significado y alcance

en este artículo argumento que, pese al llamado “escepticismo cartesiano”, el significado y alcance de la refutación cartesiana del escéptico y del ateo pueden comprenderse a la luz de tres hitos metafísicos. En la primera sección examino de qué forma este filósofo emplea argumentos escépticos como método, no como fin. Tal como enfatizo, el cogito es el punto en que la duda hiperbólica debe detenerse. Luego, en la segunda sección, discuto por qué Descartes es contrario al fideísmo. Debido a que este se relaciona con el escepticismo, y con la imposibilidad de probar la existencia de Dios, Descartes prueba que Él existe. Sostengo, en la sección final, que Dios es garante de la certeza epistemológica, incluso en el caso de las ideas claras y distintas, cuya confiabilidad pareciera en peligro debido a la hipótesis escéptica del genio maligno. Según el francés, entonces, probar que Dios existe es necesario para garantizar el conocimiento cierto, y es base para inferir la existencia del mundo externo. Los tres hitos, entonces, parecen suficientes para delimitar el sentido y alcance del llamado escepticismo cartesiano.

Divine Incomprehensibility: Can We Know The Unknowable God?

Christians traditionally hold that we know God as God is revealed to us, but that we do not know God in essence, as God is in himself. But that raises the question of whether God as revealed (GR) accurately represents God’s essence (GE). Perhaps, given our cognitive limitations, God logically cannot reveal the divine essence to us. Or perhaps God knows that it would not be good for us were he to do so. Descartes raised the possibility that God is an Evil Genius who systematically misleads us. This paper explores several attempts to build a bridge from GR to GE. All appear to have serious limitations. It concludes that, contrary to much of the tradition, GR does (in part) reveal God’s essence to us.

The Review on the Dark Sides of Creativity

Most studies on creativity concentrate on its positive sides, and explore various ways to improve creativity. However, when we view creativity as an outcome or product, and evaluate creativity in terms of its appropriateness, we can not ignore the moral aspect. From the evil genius in the western culture, and taking advantage of loopholes or playing tricks in the eastern culture, we can find many dark sides of creativity. The intension of research on the dark sides of creativity is not suppressing creativity, but helping us to understand creativity more completely, and preventing harm to individuals or society arising from innovative activities. This paper reviews the concept, psychological mechanisms, and the current research domains of the dark sides of creativity. Finally, the author discuss several future research directions.

Pursuing “the Unhappiest Idea Possible” in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales

Pursuing “the Unhappiest Idea Possible” in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales Keat Murray (bio) Leather-Stocking Redux; or, Old Tales, New Essays Edited by jeffrey walker New York: AMS Press, 2011 284 pp. The Deerslayer (1841) Introduction by ezra tawil Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013 638 pp. The Pathfinder (1840) Introduction by wayne franklin Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015 558 pp. The Prairie (1827) Introduction by domhnall martin mitchell Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014 515 pp. It is the unhappiest idea possible, to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction. —The Knickerbocker, August 1835 When James Fenimore Cooper published The Pathfinder in 1840, the New York Review was jubilant: “We hail the reappearance of Mr. Cooper in his [End Page 477] old and true sphere, with deeper regret than ever that he should so long have been unfaithful to his proper vocation” (Rev. of The Pathfinder 479). It wasn’t that Cooper had been unproductive in the 1830s but that he had abandoned “his proper vocation” of writing historical fiction, so often set on the sea and on the frontier, to hazard his reputation on a variety of genres imbued with social and political commentary. In this regard, what marked the “true work of genius” in the author’s “reappearance” in The Pathfinder was actually his disappearance. In the new book, continued the reviewer, “our pleasure is marred by scarcely a false feeling and disgusting self-obtrusion of his two or three last productions; on the contrary, the person of the author is lost in his works,” which is to say that as long as Cooper is not detected in his fiction he stands a chance of winning approval (480). Rather than tolerating the “disgusting self-obtrusion” of the author’s more overtly critical publications, the reviewer prefers his virtual self-negation. The sentiment so forcefully expressed in the New York Review was not new to Cooper in 1840, for he had faced similar charges in the 1830s when he published his European novels, travel books, and other nonfiction. In 1835, for instance, the Knickerbocker deemed his political satire, The Monikins, clear evidence that “an evil genius [had] prompted him to shoot from his sphere” (Rev. of The Monikins 152). Defiling “the sturdy American feelings” and the “love of country” he had so masterfully engendered in his old “sphere” of historical fiction, Cooper was turning against his countrymen to rouse “social and political strife” with the vile “pugnacious spirit” he had acquired during his extended travel in Europe (152–53). To the New York Review Cooper’s “reappearance” in The Pathfinder hinged not only on authorial self-removal but also on the “inimitable” presence of Natty Bumppo, who after thirteen years in the grave was resuscitated in the “absolute identity of person” that “nobody but he could be” (480). To the delight of the Review, The Pathfinder demonstrated the author’s ability to remove his polemical self from his writings for the purpose of recreating “a personage more vividly and truly real … than nineteen twentieths of the living men of flesh and blood” (480). Presenting Bumppo so “clearly and freshly” in the pages of The Pathfinder signified that the ruckus swirling around Cooper’s writings in the 1830s had had no effect on him when he finally decided to exhume Natty Bumppo for his readers in 1840. His pen no longer obstructed by intrusive politics, Cooper [End Page 478] had reset himself in his proper sphere, ostensibly conceding the advice the Knickerbocker had offered five years earlier: “It is the unhappiest idea possible, to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction” (152). To what degree Cooper pursued “the unhappiest idea possible” by infusing politics, explicitly or implicitly, into his thirty-two novels remains a lively issue in Cooper studies. Relevant to this review are recent critical inquiries into the political dimensions of Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales and the animated discussion they have generated about the author’s presence, and absence, in the viewpoints expressed by his famous frontiersman and the...

Stalin: new biography of a dictator

Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk's estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin's policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history. In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin's favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin's childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book's conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era.

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris

In a letter to Fritz Gartz written in 1910, Giorgio de Chirico declared: ‘I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche — all of my work demonstrates this’ (p. 16). It is this profound affinity that Ara H. Merjian examines in his handsomely produced study of de Chirico's metaphysical painting, a term that encompasses the artist's enigmatic cityscapes produced primarily in Paris between 1911 and 1915. Merjian undertakes the ambitious task of showing how de Chirico's painting not merely illustrates philosophical ideas, but, rather, enacts them through a series of innovative compositional experiments. Architecture is identified as both the means and the metaphor through which the artist gave visual form to certain ideas in Nietzsche's late writings. The central argument is structured around four paintings produced in 1914: Gare Montparnasse (Museum of Modern Art, New York), The Enigma of Fatality (Kunstmuseum, Basel), The Evil Genius of a King (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and The Seer (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Through detailed readings of these works and their placement within de Chirico's broader œuvre and the cultural milieu of pre-war Paris, Merjian examines facets of a Nietzschean ‘performance’ that is propelled as much by silence, omission, and displacement, as by the representation of objects and persons. He argues that the architectural impulse of the works consists less in picturing the built environment than in drawing attention to gaps and spaces that are left behind. While de Chirico's cityscapes could sometimes find physical counterparts in Paris, so too they resisted analogy, projecting a ‘desiccated alchemy of overdetermination and underrepresentation’ (p. 118) in their sources and references. Merjian acknowledges that ‘there have been as many different “Nietzsches” as readers of his work’ (p. 3) and that, in consequence, de Chirico's interpretation of the philosopher's writings is necessarily idiosyncratic. However, this poses certain problems for an elucidation of the philosophical ideas found within de Chirico's paintings. The ‘Nietzschean method’ that Merjian identifies in the artist's works is described as ‘a mode of vision rather than an inventory of objects’ (p. 6), a style of art production in which ‘the painter's point of view merges […] with that of the philosopher’ (p. 24). The difficulty of identifying and examining the pictorial expression of this imaginative bond means that the discussion remains, at times, allusive. This is, perhaps, an attendant difficulty of showing how painting can perform ‘philosophically’; it also derives from the fact that de Chirico's response to Nietzsche's work was not a systematic one. Yet there are points in the argument where a more detailed exegesis and contextualization of specific ideas within Nietzsche's works would have been helpful, particularly in light of the substantial secondary literature on the philosopher's late writings. Despite these reservations, the book is a valuable contribution to studies of de Chirico's works and offers many avenues for further exploration in the field of modernist studies.

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia by Julio Cortázar

Fiction Julio Cortázar. Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia. David Kurnick, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. 2014. isbn 9781584351344 In 1975 Argentine writer Julio Cortázar returned home to Paris from Brussels, where he had been participating in a meeting of the Second Russell Tribunal, an international body charged with investigating humanrights abuses in Latin America. Later that year, Cortázar’s novella Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales was first published . Now, at last, Semiotext(e) has made it available in English. The novella opens with “the narrator of our fascinating story,” unnamed but clearly Cortázar, in Brussels where, having completed work with the tribunal, he rushes to catch a train to his home in Paris. To while away the upcoming journey, he buys “The Mind on Fire,” an issue of the Mexican comic book about a caped, masked superhero , “Fantomas, the Elegant Menace.” As he reads, the narrator discovers Fantomas’s mission: to find and thwart an evil genius who is destroying the libraries of the world and threatening writers with death if they ever again put pen to paper. In the comic, Fantomas contacts many living writers—including, to the narrator’s (and our) surprise, Julio Cortázar and American critic and political activist Susan Sontag. In the novella, Sontag contacts “our narrator ” (Cortázar), urges him to finish the comic then call her back, and mentions that she expects to talk soon with Fantomas. World Literature in Review Christian Wiman’s searing intensity. Verse, page 124 Philip Teir’s wintry war. Fiction, page 118 Elise Musomandera’s powerful memoir. Miscellaneous, page 127 106 wlt may / august 2015 Before long, Fantomas, Sontag, and Cortázar are working together to thwart an evil far greater than the comic’s “bibliocide.” If this seems complicated, just wait. In our world there is a (fictional) character named Fantomas. He first appeared as a criminal mastermind (named Fantômas) in a series of forty French pulp novels published between 1911 and 1947. In 1969 he was resurrected as a gentleman thief and defender of the downtrodden in the Mexican comic-book series Fantomas, la amenaza elegante. In his novella, Cortázar includes panels and pages taken directly from issue 201 of this comic, “La inteligencia en llamas” (February 1975). Readers acquainted with Cortázar’s work will find the storytelling in Fantomas and the Multinational Vampires familiar. In his dauntingly experiential novel Rayeula (1963; Eng. Hopscotch, 1966), Cortázar used collage as a structural principle for pure prose. He later extended this technique to visual material, such as engravings , designs, and photographs in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967; Eng. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 1986) and Último Round (1969). And by 1975 Cortázar had published an overtly political novel about Latin American politics, Libro de Manuel (1973; Eng. A Manual for Manuel, 1978), which included extracts from newspaper articles. But the tone of the later work is nothing like the playfulness of Fantomas and the Multinational Vampires. To some, addressing human-rights abuses in this way, via a character born of French pulp novels and Mexican comics, may seem incongruous or even inappropriate. But such is Cortázar’s way: in an interview in the Paris Review, he remarked, “For me, literature is a form of play . . . it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game.” The production values of this slim book are up Semiotext(e)’s usual high standards. David Kurnick’s translation—and especially his essential afterword—are firstrate . In an appendix, Semiotext(e) includes excerpts from the findings of the tribunal. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Filip David. Kuća sećanja i zaborava. Belgrade. Laguna. 2014. isbn 9788652117499 Over the past decade, several excellent post-Yugoslavia novels have been published on genocide and the Holocaust. This indicates a strong writers’ need for reconstructing the past and analyzing the present. Filip David is a renowned author, known and translated abroad. What distinguishes his new novel, Kuća sećanja i zaborava (The house of memories and forgetfulness ), from Bosnian and Herzegovinian...

‘Animale- macchina’ e ‘genio maligno’: due idee non cartesiane nell’ Harmonie universelle di Mersenne

In this note I criticize Robert Lenoble’s thesis concerning the presence of beast-machine theory in Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636-37). I claim that the paragraph on which Lenoble grounds his interpretation presents, instead, a central concept for the Cartesian studies, namely that of the ‘evil genius’. The evil genius argument is used by Mersenne in relation to the problem of perception and knowledge, moreover, it is used against skepticism before the publication of Descartes Discours de la methode

RETRACTED: Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity

We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: They both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in this research). In five experiments, participants had the opportunity to behave dishonestly by overreporting their performance on various tasks. They then completed one or more tasks designed to measure creativity. Those who cheated were subsequently more creative than noncheaters, even when we accounted for individual differences in their creative ability (Experiment 1). Using random assignment, we confirmed that acting dishonestly leads to greater creativity in subsequent tasks (Experiments 2 and 3). The link between dishonesty and creativity is explained by a heightened feeling of being unconstrained by rules, as indicated by both mediation (Experiment 4) and moderation (Experiment 5).

Purifying Our Political Theology--Second Thoughts on the Received Wisdom Behind "Constantinianism"

This is a book with an edge. Its author, by no means a provocateur per definitionem, is necessarily provocative, and this for the simple reason that he is challenging a fundamental assumption about the early church that has achieved widespread currency. Whether among popular writers (e.g., Dan Brown), historians (e.g., Ramsay MacMullen and James Carroll), or theologians (e.g., John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas), the name of Constantine is associated with “tyranny, anti-Semitism, hypocrisy, apostasy and heresy”; it represents, at best, “a hardened power-politician who never really became a Christian” yet “who harnessed the energy of the church for his own political ends” and, at worst, a “brute,” a “murderer,” a “usurper,” alas, an “evil genius” (pp. 9, 92, 177). Stated economically, Constantine has been “a whipping boy for a long time, and still is today” (p. 9). Described by its author, Peter J. Leithart, a senior fellow at New Saint Andrews College, as “old-fashioned,” Defending Constantine takes up the “traditional” Constantinian questions that “historians have long since tired of answering” (p. 9). In a supremely colorful way, it engages more recent scholarship for a wider audience with several principal aims. Leithart seeks to offer the reader a full-blooded “life of Constantine,” given the fact that “[n]early everything about Constantine is disputed” (p. 10). But the volume has an explicit and visibly theological trajectory as well, insofar as the author is burdened to refute the polemic of “Constantinianism,” a term of derision proffered by Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder. While Yoder is by no means the only exponent of the anti-Constantine thesis, Leithart considers Yoder's to be “the most sophisticated and systematic treatment of the concept” (p. 11). Yoder's baseline assumption is that Constantinianism represents a heretical mindset that has distorted Christian faith since the fourth century. In Yoder's telling of the patristic story, “the church ‘fell’ in the fourth century (or thereabouts) and has not yet recovered from that fall” (p. 11). Constantinianism, therefore, represents “the wedding of piety to power,” that is, “the notion that the empire or state, the ruler of civil government rather than the church, is the primary bearer of meaning in history” (p. 176). A further aim, issuing out of Leithart's critique of Yoderian political theology, is to argue that, far from representing the church's fall (contra Yoder and his disciples), the fourth century presents us with something of “a model for Christian political practice” (pp. 10-11). Such a tendentious claim, of course, will need justification.

A meta-analytic review of the Dark Triad–intelligence connection

We conducted a meta-analytic review of the relations between general mental ability (GMA) and the Dark Triad (DT) personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—to determine if individuals who display socially exploitative social qualities tend to be more intelligent or less intelligent. Across 48 independent samples, GMA showed no consistent relation with any DT trait. These effects were not sufficient to support either the “evil genius” hypothesis (highly intelligent individuals tend to display socially exploitative personality traits) or the “compensatory” hypothesis (less intelligent individuals compensate for their cognitive disadvantages by adopting manipulative behavioral tendencies). However, these relations were moderated, to some extent, by the sex and age of the participants, type of sample studied, and the measure of GMA.