Intellectual Limitations Research Articles

Frame of reference: toward a definition of animation

Some animation scholars assert that framing animation in a formal definition would necessarily impose intellectual limits on inquiry, while others contend that any definition wide enough to encapsulate the full gamut of ‘all things animated’ must be too wide to be meaningful. International organizations of animation ‘experts’, who have taken on the responsibility of helping humankind to understand animation, fare poorly in terms of their commitment to the pursuit of a definition, citing ‘too wide a range’ of things qualifying as being animation, and that forcing a definition could create dissonance within the animation community of scholars. Despite being experts however, the group will not formally say what properties or commonalities unite the things that they consider to be animated. After a pointed and persistent effort at uncovering a definition through spirited queries and dialogue with these groups of animation experts, I was left with many unanswered questions. Why don’t international organizations of animation scholars believe that a definition of animation is necessary? Is a definition of animation necessary? If these organizations of animation scholars cannot define animation, who can? Who will? If an ‘animated thing’ is part of a distinct group of ‘things that are animated’, then what are the properties of the thing that makes it a part of the group of ‘animated things’? Moreover, who would benefit from a definition of animation, and who would not? The purpose of this article is to explore and discuss some of these questions, in the hope that knowledge and understanding will result from the central question: what is the core set of properties that makes a thing ‘animated’?

Early Modern or Late Imperial Philology? The Crisis of Classical Learning in Eighteenth Century China

The discourses of classical scholars during the eighteenth century reinforced a shift from Song-Ming rationalism to a more skeptical and secular classical empiricism. By making precise scholarship the source of acceptable knowledge, Qing classicists contended that the legitimate reach of ancient ideals should be reevaluated through comparative delineation of the textual sources from which all such knowledge derived. This turn to empirically based classical inquiry meant that abstract ideas and rational argumentation gave way as the primary objects of elite discussion to concrete facts, verifiable institutions, ancient natural studies, and historical events. In general, Qing classicists regarded Song and Ming “Learning of the Way” as an obstacle to verifiable truth because it discouraged further inquiry along empirical lines. The empirical approach to knowledge they advocated placed proof and verification at the heart of analysis of the classical tradition. During this time, scholars and critics also applied historical analysis to the official Classics. Classical commentary yielded to textual criticism and a “search for evidence” to refortify the ancient canon. Representing a late imperial movement in Confucian letters, Qing classicists still sought to restore the classical vision. The early modern power of their philology, however, yielded the forces of decanonization and delegitimation as modernist trends, which went beyond the intellectual limits they had imposed on their own writings.

Parallel Lives for Peace

February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 157 1 Ceadel, in the work under review, is quoting from Papers 13: 529. PARALLEL LIVES FOR PEACE Andrew G. Bone Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 bone@mcmaster.ca Martin Ceadel. Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872–1967. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2009. Pp. xv, 438. isbn 978-0199571161 (hb). £68; us$99. “If there is to be an Anti-War League,” Russell wrote Lady Ottoline on 17 September 1914, “[Norman Angell] must be its Cobden” (p. 169).1 That Angell ultimately failed to provide such a lead is one of the most interesting episodes of a fascinating political life expertly pieced together by Martin Ceadel. That Russell ranked him as heir apparent to the celebrated Victorian free trader and critic of the Crimean War provides a measure of the reputation Angell had built in preceding years as a publicist for peace. With his best-selling book The Great Illusion (1910), he had supposedly inaugurated a “new paciWsm” grounded in realism not sentiment. Its central argument was that the Wnancial and commercial interdependence of modern industrialized states made armed conXict between them futile, for the victors in any war of conquest would be harmed as much as the vanquished. Although developed with the verve of a born propagandist , this alluring thesis was, according to Ceadel, “overstated in certain respects and under-explained in others” (p. 87)—adaptable to both a paciWst position and one of military preparedness. Dogged by these apparent contradictions , Angell would spend much of his later career trying unsuccessfully to reconcile them. He was prone to internal inconsistency in his writings because of a habit of “arriving at their themes inductively and experientially more than through academic cerebration or a priori inference” (p. 5). In a sense he literally “lived” The Great Illusion, an approach to politics utterly diTerent from Russell’s (as Ceadel acknowledges in the same passage). Angell’s intellectual limitations did not prevent his signature work from becoming a runaway success. It sold over two million copies, was translated into twenty-Wve languages and stimulated the formation of numerous “Angellite” study-groups, leagues and societies, together with the journal War and Peace. His devotees included successful industrialists and Tory politicians, as well as Quaker paciWsts, Liberal disarmers and anti-militarists inside the Independent Labour Party. This breadth of appeal is quite astonishing, not least, for example, February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 158 Reviews 2 See Papers 13: xxxii. 3 Ibid., pp. 66 and 148. because orthodox socialists shouldz have been condemning capitalism as the primary agent of war, not embracing it as an instrument for its prevention. “Angellism ” was also at odds theoretically with that radical strain exempliWed by J.yA. Hobson and H.yN. Brailsford (the latter of whom penned a critical review of The Great Illusionz) and which emphasized how certain vested interests—in international Wnance, the armaments and allied industries and the “yellow” press—did proWt from war or threats of war. The Edwardian Russell was something of an “Angellite” in his robust defence of free trade on internationalist as much as economic grounds. Or perhaps it was more the case that he and Angell were “Cobdenites”. Although both men’s dissenting radicalism owed something to the inspirational tribune of the Anti-Corn Law League, Russell and Angell were also interested in the psychology as well as the economics of war and peace. The most persistent criticism faced by Angell after August 1914 was the least fair; he had only ever suggested that war was irrational , not that it was impossible. In fact, war would remain highly likely, he thought, so long as its irrationality was not much more widely appreciated. He had tackled this issue in his Wrst book and returned to it with the rather desultory (for Ceadel) discussion of human nature comprising the second part of The Great Illusion. Angell also acquired, as a result, a lifelong commitment to mass education for peace, although he repeatedly failed to develop a...

Unite People by Global Awareness Through Wisdom for the Gifted

Mankind will unite harmoniously if there is a focus on brotherhood in the economic domain by sharing; if there is equality in the judicial domain, since under the law and stars we are all equal; and if there is freedom of the mind in domains such as media, science, and religion. Why is wisdom a priority for the gifted? Society crucially depends on how well the next generation of gifted students is educated. The most important and most difficult objective will be to aim not just toward academic accomplishment, but on developing wisdom. First, it is essential to help gifted students build recognition of their intellectual limits i.e. humility, and a consciousness and commitment to meeting one's obligations, together with an advanced knowledge of history. Murray (2007) said that those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise.

Parenting with mild intellectual deficits: parental expectations and the educational attainment of their children.

We examined how the educational expectations that parents with mild intellectual deficits had for their children shaped their children's attainment, and how parents' own intellectual limitations affected this process. We identified 612 parents with mild intellectual deficits and 2,712 comparison parents from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a prospective longitudinal study in which participants were followed from ages 18 to 64. Compared to the norm, parents with mild intellectual deficits expected their children to complete less education, even after controlling for sociodemographic background variables, and children of parents with mild intellectual deficits did, in fact, complete fewer years of education. For both groups, parental expectations were the strongest predictor of attainment. Results suggest that disparities in education are shaped in part by parents' beliefs about educational opportunities.

The ‘birth of truth’: Alain Badiou and Plato’s banishment of the poets

Plato famously banishes the poets from his ideal city in book X of his Republic. Yet in this banishment Plato establishes the boundaries of reason, art and poetry — boundaries that have haunted western thinkers since antiquity. In this article I will explore those Platonic boundaries, specifically the intellectual limits of poetic writing as reflected upon by self-identified Platonist Alain Badiou. That being said, I am not attempting, strictly speaking, to look at Badiou’s interpretation of Plato’s banishment of poetry. Instead, I am using the banishment as a springboard for discussion of Badiou’s notion of poetry as the ‘birth of truth’ in his Handbook of Inaesthetics. I will examine the way this text interacts with Plato’s conceptual banishment. I assert that this interaction should illuminate the status of writing — especially artistic writing — in the state.

Review: The Illusion of Freedom

Tom Gallagher introduces his study of Scottish nationalism with that much quoted line from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard: ' if you want things to remain the same, things will have to change.' This could, with some justification, be read as the wager on devolution made by the Labour Party, and Gallagher is convincing in his criticism of that party's intellectual limitations and conservatism in office, especially its failure to behave 'as if devolution was an essential and welcome part of its ideology and practice' (p. 115). However, the meaning of Lampedusa's words here is rather different and could be usefully inverted because Gallagher's fear is that the Scottish National Parry's prospectus has become: 'if you want things to change, things will have to remain the same.' Gallagher, then, is even-handed in his rage against Scottish machine politics and is deeply and patriotically disturbed by what he believes to be the present betrayal of die nation's democratic potential. Indeed, one discovers in The Leopard that the promised future is likely to be a future of petty betrayals, manipulation and manoeuvre much like the past and present, one in which decent values will continue to be compromised. Moreover, Lampedusa suggests that the grander the political rhetoric, the more likely it is that the reality will be sordid. Certainly, there will be little softening of the brute exclusiveness which attends the exercise of power. The regime may change but it is likely that those in power will ignore the opinion of ordinary people or simply transform their opinions into acceptable and convenient formulae. Not only is there a sense of foreboding about the future but also a profound sense of loss about the past. Gallagher's

Offenders With Intellectual Disability: Characteristics, Prevalence, and Issues in Forensic Assessment

Although the problem of people with disabilities as victims of crime has been well recognized, the known characteristics of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) also make them vulnerable to becoming perpetrators of crimes. Most such crimes are minor, but the 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision called national attention to people with ID and people with dual diagnoses who commit capital crimes. This article reviews the data on offenders with intellectual and dual disabilities and the challenges related to their diagnoses and their roles in the criminal justice system. Offenders with ID are overwhelmingly individuals with mild intellectual disability, and their characteristics largely resemble those of offenders who do not have an ID diagnosis. They do not engage predominantly in any one form of criminal behavior, and their readily identifiable characteristics do not set them apart from offenders without a disability. However, their intellectual limitations make it more difficult for them to understand their Miranda rights; to work effectively with their attorneys; or for those found incompetent to stand trial, to profit from formal programs to restore them to competency. Assessment methods, particularly assessment of malingering of ID, have many limitations when applied in the criminal justice setting.

A Post-Modern Morgenthau?

It takes no huge mental leap to jump from the word Morgenthau to realism. Add a third word, conservatism, and then things get tricky. Most of us implicitly think realism and conservatism overlap, and they frequently do, but often imperfectly and sometimes even uncomfortably. Hans J. Morgenthau, the immigrant intellectual and godfather of mid-century American realism, is a classic example of the imperfect and uncomfortable overlap. A transplant from Weimar Germany and an international lawyer turned theorist, Morgenthau was also a committed anti-Wilsonian and a realist, but that does necessarily make for a self-identified conservative. Professional and amateur Morgenthau watchers usually have a choice. The unsympathetic among them can argue Morgenthau mixed judicious elements of opportunism with an unfortunate strain of intellectual confusion. The more sympathetic observer could acknowledge tensions and the inevitable compromises while admitting that this made Hans Morgenthau a keen social critic armed, as the cliche goes, to “speak truth to power.” Indiana University Political Science Professor William E. Scheuerman is of the latter camp. Scheuerman’s complex, challenging, evolving Morgenthau first emerged from the Weimar intellectual left and then joined the realist critique. Indeed, Scheuerman meticulously portrays Morgenthau as nuanced and enigmatic and, in some instances, puzzling—all virtues of an intellectual pushing against the boundaries of restrictive categories. The book’s premise is that Morgenthau, on the surface a realist’s realist, had nonetheless transcended the intellectual limitations of realism. As such, retracing the critical chapters of the early and late Morgenthau helps us to construct something infinitely more nuanced and perhaps more humane than the tired incantations of power politics so often associated with realism. This is the premise of Morgenthau.

Parental Depression in the Context of Divorce and the Impact on Children

The impact of divorce on children has been well documented over the past 30 years. Divorcing parents who are also experiencing clinical depression often have a compromised ability to parent well and to give the children needed support. Children are then impacted both by the divorce itself and the effects of parental depression. They are at higher risk of numerous problems including poorer physical health, deficits in academic performance not attributable to intellectual limitations, poor social functioning, conduct disorder and other disruptive behavior problems, phobias, and other anxiety disorders. Because children of depressed parents are at higher risk for depression themselves, they should be monitored for depressive symptoms. If there are concerns, the child should be assessed by a mental health professional.

Characteristics and Needs of People With Intellectual Disability Who Have Higher IQs

Characteristics and Needs of People With Intellectual Disability Who Have Higher IQs

Memory and Morals in Memento : Hume at the Movies

In the hopes of directing students to the great philosophic texts through the entertainment fare they consume, this article analyzes the philosophic significance of Memento, a 2000 film directed by Christopher Nolan. We understand the film as a thought experiment in which memory capacity is partially removed from the main character, Leonard Shelby. The experiment is run with Leonard's thoughts and behavior according with Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology. As a result, Memento ends up illustrating Hume's positions on personal identity, the character of justice, and the intellectual limitations of the human mind.

Thoughts on Grammar Intervention in AAC

Abstract In this article, I propose that, for several reasons, grammar should be an early focus of communication interventions for young children using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. The basic goals for such programs should be to facilitate the child's comprehension of the language of the community, or the target language, thus leading the way to literacy, and to foster the child's use of symbol combinations that mirror the grammatical patterns of speaking children acquiring the target language, even if they cannot be fully grammatically complete. I introduce five principles that underlie most successful approaches to grammar interventions with children with specific language impairment. My initial attempts to apply these principles to interventions with children with complex communication needs indicate that they may be of considerable value to clinicians planning intervention programs. On the other hand, the challenges posed by the intellectual and physical limitations of many AAC users and their communication systems make it necessary to modify at least Principle 5 if the basic goals of intervention are to be met.

Targeting the unactivated conformations of protein kinases for small molecule drug discovery

Background: The number of drugs in active clinical development or on the market that target the unactivated conformational states of protein kinases is growing and represents a significant portion of kinase research at biopharmaceutical companies. These non-classical kinase inhibitors have a mode of action which may overcome some of the liabilities of classical ATP-site inhibitors that substantially overlap the space that ATP occupies in the activated kinase. Objective: This review will discuss state-of-the-art methods of inhibiting protein kinases by targeting the unactivated conformations of the enzyme with small molecules directed to the ATP binding region. Methods: Biochemical and structural biology publications and public domain crystal structures were evaluated to identify key concepts in drug discovery for unactivated protein kinase inhibitors that target the ATP binding region. Conclusion: The potential for enhanced selectivity, potency and duration of pharmacological action may allow non-classical kinase therapeutics to be used for chronic dosing in non-life-threatening indications. Moreover, by targeting additional conformational space on the kinase protein it is possible that new chemical matter will be discovered such that current intellectual property limitations on traditional ATP-site chemical scaffolds may be circumvented.

The strangest song: One father’s quest to help his daughter find her voice

The high degree of interindividual variability in musical abilities and proclivities is not well understood. Indeed, the genetic, environmental, developmental, and neurocognitive substrates of musicality (itself a concept difficult to define operationally) remain quite obscure. That said, such differences are easily appreciated, in both senses of the word. On the other hand, the often obvious differences in cognitive abilities associated with neurodevelopmental disorders frequently have pernicious consequences for affected individuals and their families. In The strangest song: one father’s quest to help his daughter find her voice, Teri Sforza tells a story that melds different worlds of individual experience and social response — that of an extraordinarily musically talented, intellectually impaired woman with Williams syndrome (WS). WS, a multisystem disorder occurring in about 1 in 7,500 live births, arises from hemizygous deletion of a 1.55-Mb region containing some 28 genes at chromosome 7q11.23. Physical manifestations include dysmorphic (“elfin”) facial features, supravalvular aortic stenosis and other connective tissue abnormalities, and growth retardation. Characteristic personality traits include hypersociability and heightened empathy (generally described as “delightful”), along with nonsocial anxieties. Developmental delay and cognitive impairment are the norm, with low IQ scores and severe deficits in spatial and arithmetic cognition and in conceptual reasoning. However, WS appears to be associated with relative preservation of abilities in language, face processing, sociability, and music. This mix of cognitive abilities and disabilities has proven irresistible as a human model for examining the links among genes, neurodevelopment, cognition, and behavior. Defining the genetic substrates of WS-associated neurodevelopmental abnormalities has not been easy, in part because of the stereotypical nature of the responsible deletion. Study of atypical deletions as well as mouse models has, however, implicated several genes in various aspects of the neurocognitive and craniofacial phenotype, including GTF2IRD1 (a TFII-I transcription factor), CYLN2 (cytoplasmic linker protein 2), LIMK1 (LIM kinase 1), and FZD9 (frizzled 9). The fragmented nature of the WS cognitive phenotype — in particular, the lack of apparent difficulties with language despite evident severe impairment in other cognitive domains — has also provided considerable experimental grist for the mill of neuropsychological theory. But WS is something experienced by individuals and those who care for and about them. To echo neurologist Oliver Sacks, WS is a “what” that happens to a “who.” And whatever the genetic substrates, the social environment is critical to how WS and other developmental disorders are experienced. These points are illuminated in a compelling way in The strangest song, an account of Gloria Lenhoff and her parents, written by Sforza with Gloria’s parents. Born before the syndrome was first described, Gloria had what was, in retrospect, a typically difficult childhood for someone with WS. Her likely future was one defined in large part by limitation of possibility and hope. However, Gloria’s parents’ recognition of, and delight in, her musical affinity and gifts, along with their single-minded pursuit of ways to develop and provide performing outlets for her musical talents, has led to what clearly seems to be a remarkably fulfilling life. Despite her varied intellectual limitations, Gloria turned into an accomplished lyric soprano (and accordionist) with a vast repertoire of songs in a profusion of languages who has enriched a broad public and herself with her gifts. Of note, Gloria’s father’s activism was itself instrumental in spurring recognition and study of the WS musical phenotype. Compared with normal individuals, those with WS tend to exhibit more engagement with music — more emotion while listening to music, more time spent on musical activities, and onset of interest in music at a younger age. They also have a greater incidence of auditory anomalies, including hyperacusis, odynacusis, phonophobia, and auditory fascinations. Using functional MRI imaging, Levitin et al. have described possible neural correlates of this unusual auditory and musical sensitivity (1). Of course, as in the population at large, the actual musical abilities of individuals with WS (like their other cognitive abilities) vary widely. However, music appears to provide a uniquely important avenue for cognitive development and emotional fulfillment for many people with WS. The ongoing struggle by Gloria’s father and others to provide opportunities for such development and fulfillment drives much of the narrative of this book. Sforza, neither professional scientist nor professional musician, has written an entertaining book for a general audience. Those looking for a state-of-the-art review of the science of WS will not find it here. Indeed, scientists will wince at the casual misinformation (e.g., Watson and Crick did not discover DNA). Similarly, musicians will stumble over occasional lapses in tone. But these are minor quibbles. Sforza beautifully limns the key role played by the social environment in the individual experience of genetic developmental disability, careful attention to which has the potential for helping people transcend biological and social categories in their own unique ways.

Privilegering af perspektiver - en refleksion over begrebskonstruktionerne inklusion / eksklusion og intergrering /marginalisering i den sociologiske iagttagelse

Priviligizing perspectives: Reflection on the construction of the concepts of inclusion/exclusion and integration/marginalization in sociological perception Social “inclusion” and “exclusion” are “new” concepts which have emerged from “old” concepts such as inequality, poverty and marginalisation, and the purpose of this article is to examine and discuss the practical potentials and the intellectual limitations accompanying the use of conceptual dichotomies such as inclusion/exclusion and integration/marginalisation. It is argued that the concepts are hea¬vily dependent on political discourse, and that the concepts reduce sociology to be a provider of instrumental know¬ledge about efficient forms of social integration as a “with-in” society techni¬cal question. As such, the concepts screen out questions of social integrati¬on that are closely interrelated with the societal forms of solidarity and the soci¬al factors constituting a society. Furthermore, it is argued that the dichotomic and asymmetrical character of the concepts support a process in which certain perspectives are “privile¬ged”, while others are excluded, a pro¬cess in which the technical perspective is strengthened while a critical discus¬sion about solidarity is counter-indica¬ted. It is concluded that a dismantling of the stronghold of the dichotomies might imply Bourdieuian og Luhmannian in¬spired analyses in order to raise research questions which are contra-intui¬ti¬ve and oriented towards unhegemonic knowledge.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Very Clever Woman in Vanity Fair

Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Very Clever Woman in Vanity Fair Catherine Keyser (bio) Edna St. Vincent Millay was a magazine celebrity in the 1920s. Vanity Fair trumpeted her poetic skill and her loveliness in its presentation of her poetry and biography. The October 1921 issue cast Millay both as an artist of sentiment, the traditional nineteenth-century province of feminine influence, and a representative modern girl: "The Most Poignant Lyricist of the Modern Generation."1 As Sandra Gilbert observes, Millay mocked her own reputation for romanticism.2 She addresses her celebrity in a November 1922 column signed with her nom de plume Nancy Boyd: "the girl sitting at the next table was Edna St. Vincent Millay . . . eating an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages . . . Such a shock. I had always imagined her so ethereal."3 Though many may have "imagined her ethereal," the public image of Millay as a modern girl with unabashed appetites and ironic self-appraisal was also central to her literary reputation. Her 1922 volume of light verse, A Few Figs From Thistles, included poems that would number among her most quoted and anthologized, including "First Fig," "Recuerdo," and "I think I should have loved you presently." Her epigrammatic style and personal focus in these verses represented a departure from the high seriousness and cosmic concerns of a poem like "Renascence," which marked her entrance into the national literary scene through a contest run by St. Nicholas magazine. Her adult engagement with midtown magazine culture as represented by Vanity Fair—the quipping style this magazine encouraged and the gendered types it employed to market a sophisticated lifestyle—explains in part her development of this comic aesthetic. Further, her periodical work provides an ironic commentary on the gender tensions found within intellectual and print culture in New York in the 1920s. In Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women, Nina Miller explores Millay's self-conscious manipulation [End Page 65] of her celebrity as a representative Greenwich Village bohemian, and she helpfully suggests some of the ways in which Millay's poetry addresses Village vogues like the Free Love movement and the economic concerns of would-be political radicals. As Miller puts it, "Millay stood for more than lyricism and sentiment; she represented New Womanhood and the assertive female sexuality that gave focus to the culture's diffuse ambivalence about contemporary social change."4 Millay not only stood in for the penurious and promiscuous bohemian lifestyles of the Village; she also provided a mouthpiece for the cosmetics-wearing and cocktail-toting sophisticates of midtown even as she mocked the superficiality of their concerns. Millay engages this middlebrow modernism using the personae of women who complement their sexual prowess with social poise and sardonic sensibilities, fitting into their fashionable context while criticizing it. By thus indirectly commenting on the periodical medium, Millay expresses concerns about magazine discourses that contain or minimize intelligence and humor in and by women. The urban "smart" magazine was a type of periodical that enjoyed unparalleled success in the first four decades of the twentieth century, as George H. Douglas argues in his history of the genre.5 According to Douglas, these magazines were characterized by an appeal to "sophisticated urbanites, for the kind of person who was well traveled, well read, well acquainted."6 The reserve, irony, and social savvy of the sophisticated urban perspective was often established at the expense of the unsubtle flapper, caricatured both for her intellectual limitations and her flirtatious manipulations. Millay published a parable in Vanity Fair in July of 1922 about male reluctance to share the stance of cynical superiority with women. She recasts the tale of Diogenes the Cynic, and the tub he inhabited to pursue an ascetic life. Millay introduces into this confined space "the woman," whose presence Diogenes finds intolerable. This parable is suggestive of the interrelation among the gender dynamics of Vanity Fair, publication, and professionalism. After all, this story describes a newly and uncomfortably shared space, perhaps an image for the magazine itself, that prizes "cynicism," a pose of superiority and irony. In an unusual move, Millay signs this story with her own name. She...

From Baroque to pre-enlightenment: Resolving the epistemological crisis

By the final decades of the century, there developed a distinct epistemological mentality which marked the end of the Baroque with its pessimistic obsession with human intellectual limitations and ...

A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy Michael Lackey A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Edited by C.G. Prado . Amherst: Humanity Books, 2003. 329 pp. $35.00 pbk., 1-59102-105-7. The much-needed essays in A House Divided, while calculated to clarify the fundamental differences and similarities between analytic and Continental philosophy, will certainly provoke impassioned responses rather than serve as a manual for distinguishing the two traditions. Useful, fascinating, illuminating, these essays offer genuine insight into the evolution and history of the split in philosophy, but as valuable as these essays may be, there are still some problems [End Page 276] with this volume. First and foremost is the selection of philosophers. Not Alvin Goldman, Roderick Chisolm, Ernest Sosa, or Alvin Plantinga, but Carnap, Quine, Strawson, and Davidson represent the analytic tradition in this book. This latter group of philosophers—which holds that metaphysics is no more true than poetry (Carnap: see Allen, 48), that concepts are cultural constructions instead of prediscursive givens (Quine: see Matthews, 159), that "metaphysics is subordinated to experience" (Strawson: see Stocker, 284), and that truth is a concept that needs to be "reinvented" in relation to its cultural context (Davidson: see Sandbothe, 253)—is certainly much more amenable to the Continental approach than the former group. Put simply, the essays in this volume are primarily Continental or anti-analytic, which is not necessarily a problem. But because the volume subtitle suggests a comparison of the two traditions, and not a clear endorsement of one over the other, unsuspecting readers may be a bit surprised when they discover that many of the essays seek to expose "the intellectual limitations . . . of the whole 'analytic' movement" (Allen, 55) or to demonstrate that "the analytic tradition is intentionally bankrupt" (Babich, 92). For instance, Richard Rorty, who is more anti-analytic than Continental, claims that analytic philosophers treat the Concept like an immutable Idea, an ahistorical precept "which philosophical analysis can hope to pin down." By contrast, conversational (instead of Continental) philosophers treat the concept like a person, "never quite the same twice, always developing, always maturing" (21). Since Rorty rejects the existence of "an overarching ahistorical framework" (27), he sees philosophy, not in terms of accurately signifying or representing metaphysical concepts, but in terms of the conversation that philosophers can and do have with one another (28). And for Rorty, only when we abandon the "barren scholasticism" (29) of the analytic tradition will this conversational style of philosophy be possible. Barry Allen and Babette E. Babich follow Rorty's lead by also casting analytic philosophy in an unflattering light. For Allen, analytic philosophers have deluded themselves. Given their valorization of science and logic, they naively assume that "the logical syntax of science" (52) is philosophically trustworthy. But were analytic philosophers able to understand that knowledge is poiesis (55), a provisional and experimental conception of the world, they would realize that behind science is a "rationalist will-to-order" (54), a "Platonic-Christian subordination of thought to a 'duty to truth'" (55). To make knowledge dynamic and liberating, therefore, it is necessary to reject the analytic philosopher's "totalitarianism of 'order'" (51) and to embrace the Continental philosopher's idea of knowledge as creative experiment. Babich pens perhaps the most relentless and fascinating critique of the analytic tradition. Analytic philosophers pride themselves on being logical, rigorous, and clear, which is their not-so-subtle way of denouncing Continental philosophers as illogical, sloppy, and incoherent. For Babich, however, the analytic [End Page 277] philosopher's virtues would be serious vices for the Continental philosopher. Humans and life are profoundly ambiguous, and since Continental philosophers seek to articulate the messy conditions of human living, "unclarity belongs to the essence of what it is that Continental philosophers do" (92). In other words, analytic philosophers may be rigorous and clear, but they have thereby "renounced contact with the world" (74), while Continental philosophers may reject systematic clarity, but they have thereby established a more intimate connection with everyday living. Certainly not all of the essays are as anti-analytic as Rorty's, Allen's, or Babich's. Many compare and contrast the two traditions, but...

Digital Watermarking and Its Impact on Intellectual Property Limitation for the Digital Age

This paper reports on a study that investigated the status and anticipated development of e-Business activity. A prime aim of the study was to increase understanding of the human and organizational issues that arise with e-Business, and the extent to which these are currently addressed. An expert panel method was used, which involved interviewing 70 leading practitioners of, and experts in, e-Business in the UK. The findings identify the distinguishing novel features of e-Business, highlight the key issues it raises, and provide evidence of current uptake and impacts. The findings include ideas on good practice. The study emphasizes the importance of taking a holistic, sociotechnical view of the complex set of interrelated changes involved in e-Business.