Realm Of Nature Research Articles

The Watch‐Bitch Now: Reassessing the Natural Woman in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things

This essay provides the first sustained scholarly analysis of two new novels by women: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things. It argues that these texts, when read together, provide a crucial site for reevaluating the legacies of radical French feminist theory and ecofeminism in the late twentieth century, while also testing some of the limits of recent work in critical animal studies. In both novels, female characters pursue impossible communions with nature: in one, a woman wants to become a tree; in the other, a woman wants to become a rabbit. Kang and Wood radicalize the cultural intimacy between women and nature in exploring the potential of the natural realm—the realm outside the city, in Helene Cixous’s terms, stalked by the watch-bitch, the sphinx—to serve as a refuge from a violently androcentric and anthropocentric world order. Yet the two texts ultimately refuse romanticized notions of the woman in and with nature. They dramatize the risks of a negative epistemology of vulnerability, silence, and alterity that, in different ways, conditions the radical feminist reclamation of the hysteric or madwoman as a figure of protest and the various theorizations of subversive affiliations between humans and animals in ecofeminism, feminist nature writing, and critical animal studies. This essay argues that Kang and Wood’s novels reveal in contemporary feminist thought a retrospection of the debates around female madness and silence associated with second-wave feminism, especially as they reaffirm the primacy of women’s relationships with other women over their being with nature.

Palimpasestic Images of Landscape, Gender, and Ethnicity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This study explores Morrison’s A Mercy as a palimpsest, both in terms of its adoption of multiple narrators and in the way, landscape is layered with vestiges of history, myths, and most importantly, with traces of black women creativity. Reading landscape in Morrison’s novel as a multi-textured palimpsest entails an assessment of the interplay of ethnicity and gender in the novel. This study finds in Alice Walker’s employment of the symbolic connotations of the “garden” to depict the creativity of black women discussed in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Garden (1984) a theoretical framework for interpreting Florens’s creativity in reading the land and the development of her identity in relation to the natural realm. This study also explores the palimpsestic aspects in Morrison’s text both synchronically and diachronically. The diachronic aspect examines the way Morrison’s A Mercy delves into history towards earlier representations of the American landscape and shows how her text reads and overwrites others. As a model of intertextuality, the palimpsest enables Morrison to overwrite the writings of American Transcendental figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, who have gained precedence in writing and visualizing the American landscape. Conversely, the synchronic angle addresses the implications of Morrison’s adoption of multiple voices, which are laid over each other and either rival or endorse each other in the form of a palimpsest. Reading each experience as a separate layer reveals other minor embedded layers that surface through Morrison’s stylistic language and evocation of smells and colours.

Bereft of nature: renegotiating national identity in the films of Rashid Masharawi

ABSTRACTThis essay examines Rashid Masharawi’s transnationally produced films against the backdrop of problematizing the Palestinian relationship with the realm of nature. Grounded in the idea of minor transnationalism, modelled by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, drawing upon the conceptualization of ‘minor literatures’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the transnational film theory of Mette Hjort, it focuses on Masharawi’s feature films, Curfew, Haïfa, Ticket to Jerusalem, Laila’s Birthday and Palestine Stereo. Set in and around refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Masharawi’s ‘minor films’ accentuate the absence of nature from the lives of local individuals and communities, and their disconnections from the realms of natural transcendence. Masharawi affirms his position on cinema as a vehicle for the advancement of modernity, but does not negate or marginalize the ties of Palestinians to their land. Urging his audiences to contemplate the tropes in the national imaginary and the discontinuities from the romanticized narratives of land in the pre-Nakba period, he seeks what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the ‘collective paradigms of political enunciation,’ corresponding to the new modes of subjectivity.

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73)

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73) Emily Cheng (bio) This essay addresses El Grito del Norte (EGDN), a Chicana/o nationalist newspaper published in Española, a small working-class town in northern New Mexico, from 1968 to 1973. The paper was originally formed to support the politics of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), the organization led by Reies López Tijerina that in the 1960s and 1970s sought the restoration of land grants established under the Spanish and Mexican governments. Written and run by women, the paper was founded and edited by Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (known previously as Elizabeth Sutherland), whose socialist and third-world feminist politics shaped the paper's concern with the connections between rural Chicana women of New Mexico and other women of color in the US and abroad.1 Though the paper was committed to Chicana/o issues grounded in New Mexico, it soon moved away from its original role as a mouthpiece for the Alianza to include reports on indigenous issues in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. EGDN was, in Martínez's words, the "only one" of "about twenty Chicano newspapers … that was completely international."2 Of particular importance was the newspaper's reporting on Vietnam, which made it exceptional among a Chicano press in the 1960s that, George Mariscal notes, "was largely silent on the topic of the war in Southeast Asia."3 The paper's coverage included a special issue on North Vietnam by Martínez, a five-part series by Valentina Valdez explaining Vietnam and the war to readers, articles addressing Chicanos serving in the military by Enriqueta Vasquez that appeared in "El Soldado Razo Today" and her column, "Despierten! Hermanos," reports on the military events of the war, poetry by Ho Chi Minh, and a report on the Chicano Viêt Nam Project, a solidarity organization.4 While other scholars have written about the newspaper's concerns with land in New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, its third-world feminist politics, I examine how these aspects of the paper come together with its internationalism [End Page 55] to represent a distinctive and radical "environmental" politics. I do not mean to argue that the writers and activists who contributed to EGDN identified themselves as environmentalists or to attach this label to them. What I do want to argue is that, in contrast to the mainstream environmental movement that emerged in this period, these women writers possessed an environmental understanding that fundamentally engaged social justice, particularly around issues of race, gender, and imperialism. The environmental epistemology in EGDN was shaped by, but moved beyond, the long-standing relationship between Mexican-origin people, land, and nature in the US Southwest that was central to Chicana/o nationalist politics, as I discuss through Vasquez's article "La Santa Tierra." In considering Vietnam as another site in which to explore and understand the violence the US empire inflicts on land and colonized people, EGDN made connections between the US Southwest and Vietnam that developed its alternative environmental lens. Approaching the North Vietnamese as fellow peasants, or "campesinos," whose harmonious relationship to the land was being attacked by US imperialism, the newspaper made womanhood central to forging this relationship between Chicana/o and North Vietnamese anticolonialism. The feminist politics of "global sisterhood" facilitated the writers' interest in Vietnam, and their access to direct encounters with Vietnamese women through the international women's peace movement. The women writers of the paper also deployed a gendered lens that highlighted the role of women in environmental resistance to masculine military violence and symbolically established similarities between the two communities through idealized portrayals of rural, domestic life. With its attention to the lived human relationship to land, EGDN offered an alternative to notions of land that were central to mainstream American environmental thinking, which generally assumed the "separability of the human and natural realms … expressed through a melancholic attitude linking natural plenitude with human absence."5 In this mainstream tradition, land has been considered through the ideal of wilderness, and the human realm predominantly characterized by the individual relationship to the land through possession...

Le schématisme de l’invention et la pensée morphogénétique: Paul Valéry, Gilbert Simondon, D’Arcy Thompson

Gilbert Simondon has shown that schemata are not a pure product of the imagination, but that they stem from a dialogue with the «images-objects» origi-nated in the realm of technique or even in nature, which offers an endless source of dynamic schemata that allow visualizing morphogenetic processes very effi-ciently. This expansion of Kant's schematism has allowed the French philosopher to propose a new concept of invention that brings to light the schemata present in technical or natural objects and enables us to transfer them from one field of hu-man experience to another. This article proposes an application of his model to a parallel reading of two texts: Paul Valéry's L’homme et la coquille (1937) and the essay On Growth and Form (1917), penned by the English zoologist Sir D'Arcy Thompson. Making use of totally different methods -literature in the first case; geometry and physics in the second-, these two works try to clear the morphoge-netic schema of the shells. It will be shown that Valéry, transferring this schema from the realm of nature to poetry, turns the shells into the pillar of a kind of in-vention both poetic and intellectual.

Thomas Aquinas and Natural Patterns of Virtuous Conduct

In this paper, I draw on the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas to comment on natural patterns of flourishing in human virtuous life. Through the concept of “natural goodness” borrowed from Philippa Foot, I aim to show how in light of Aquinas’s moral philosophy the realm of physical nature serves as an exemplar for human reason and action. While acknowledging a great variety of cultures and the crucial role of free choice in shaping human action, I emphasize the inherent orientation of human freedom towards moral flourishing, as I find it in Aquinas’s doctrine. The desire for happiness and the natural seeds of moral virtues, terms of which the human mind discovers from various instances of natural or morally virtuous action, provide some basic orientation to human virtuous conduct according to reason. The diversity of virtuous flourishing of human lives and cultures has an immense scope according to the degree to which ordered practical reasoning allows and fosters it. At the same time, however, virtuous flourishing depends on and keeps in congruence with the intelligible patterns of nature that reason and virtue imitate.

The Character of Aswapathy as Nature’s Prayerful Rhythm in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

The present article studies the character of Aswapathy in Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savitri. In this grand epic, Aswapathy has been presented as the divine seeker of nature. In his spiritual pursuit he ascends higher and higher to discover the secret energies of nature. It is in this voyage in the realms of Nature that he comes across the creative Power of the Supreme and at once knows that it is she who alone can transform this darkness into light. He has also a certain perception that even this flawed material human race can become flawless.

“Have You Ever Seen the Crowd Goin’ Apeshit?”: Disrupting Representations of Animalistic Black Femininity in the French Imaginary

16 June 2018. London Stadium. Beyoncé and Jay–Z revealed the premiere of the music video Apeshit. Filmed inside the Louvre Museum in Paris, Beyoncé’s sexual desirability powerfully dialogues with Western canons of high art that have dehumanized or erased the black female body. Dominant tropes have historically associated the black female body with the realm of nature saddled with an animalistic hypersexuality. With this timely release, Apeshit engages with the growing current debate about the ethic of representation of the black subject in European museums. Here, I argue that Beyoncé transcends the tension between nature and culture into a syncretic language to subvert a dominant imperialistic gaze. Drawing on black feminist theories and art history, a formal analysis traces the genealogy and stylistic expression of this vocabulary to understand its political implications. Findings pinpoint how Beyoncé laces past and present, the regal nakedness of her African heritage and Western conventions of the nude to convey the complexity, sensuality, and humanity of black women—thus drawing a critical reimagining of museal practices and enriching the collective imaginary at large.

A Modern-Day Romantic: The Romantic Sublime in Hayao Miyazaki’s Creative Philosophy

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the concept of the Romantic sublime is presented within the filmography of acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki (1941-). Fronting the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli from 1985, Miyazaki has developed into an auteur figure with his films attracting considerable attention from scholars. The films of Hayao Miyazaki are characterized by a consistent creative philosophy, a philosophy that this article contends is profoundly shaped by the esthetic, philosophical, and artistic traditions of the European Romantic movement. Miyazaki’s engagement with Romanticism can be characterized by his interpretation of the Romantic sublime, a concept inherently linked to the traditions of the Romantic hero, the magical imagination, and the natural realm. This engagement with Romantic ideals is illustrated in this article by analyzing the thematic and visual elements of Miyazaki’s films, highlighting how these particular films reflect, and embody, particular Romantic ideals. In studying these films through a conceptual framework of the Romantic sublime, this article provides a deeper insight into Hayao Miyazaki’s creative philosophy.

T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics: Struggle for Survival and Society

The present paper focuses on main points of Thomas H. Huxley's lecture 'Evolution and Ethics', which addressed current social and political debate about application of evolutionary principle of competition on society. Huxley, a well-known proponent of Darwin, was strictly opposed to such application as he threatened that ethics, the base of civilized society, would disappear. He claimed that ethical process kept natural processes under control and made men truly human. He stressed that while evolution governed the biological realm of nature, ethics was domain of human conscience and society.Even though Huxley was well established scholar, ideas of his contemporary colleague Herbert Spencer often gained much more popularity amongst general public. This was certainly true in China, where Spencer's evolutionary ethics gained tremendous popularity. The Theory of Evolution in China was immediately dragged into debate about national survival. Spencer's thought was paradoxically introduced to China by translation of Huxley's critical lecture 'Evolution and Ethics'. Chinese intellectuals were, however, far more interested in the concept of struggle and competition than in philosophical questions about meaning of ethics in human society, which troubled Thomas Henry Huxley in his public lecture presented in 18th May 1893.

Possession and the Senses in Early Modern England

This article addresses the history of possession and preternatural interference through the lens of the senses. Because these sorts of cases featured the intersection of embodied and ephemeral perception, they provide singular opportunities to evaluate elite and popular conceptions of humans’ capacity to sense what lay within and beyond the natural realm. Possession cases also offer a prime opportunity to examine how attempts to ascribe meaning to bodily acts required that writers present the senses of afflicted individuals and those who attended them as intricately connected. Published possession texts thus provide an entry point from which to evaluate aspects of “intersensorality,” when witnesses appeared both to experience overlapping senses themselves and occasionally to find their perceptions linked with afflicted persons in ways that surpassed what was natural. The paper also examines the role that insensibility played in some instances of possession propaganda, both when subjects experienced complete trances and when they displayed selective inability to see, hear, or speak in reaction to cultural cues.

The concept of human nature in Noam Chomsky

One of the constants in Noam Chomsky’s philosophical, linguistic and ethical positions is the existence of what he calls “human nature”. Following Marx, Darwin and last century’s revolutions in the social sciences, human nature has been one of the most contested conceptual holdovers from modern European philosophy. Chomsky’s discoveries and models on syntax and language make up one of the frameworks to most critically offset the traditional moral dimension of human nature. Contrary to most traditions prior to his work, language can no longer be restricted to either mind, soul or spirit. Language, as Chomsky has continually upheld and sharply refined, is a physical and biological process. But how his notion of human nature derives from this process is complex, as he seems to disregard philosophy’s classic analytic delineation between the descriptive causal realm of human nature and the normative axiological extensions of the same concept. In this paper, we seek to examine the philosophical and ontological implications of Chomsky’s claim that human nature derives from the innate dimension of the language faculty. Not only does Chomsky maintain the category of human nature, he also indexes it to the question of freedom. We thereby argue for the coherence of his proposal and show how it operates to weld the perspective of a modal theory of biologically-rooted creativity to innate conditions specific to his theory of language generation. However, we question whether its restriction to humans alone is sustainable from a scientific perspective by putting forth the claim that Chomsky’s science is in fact a radical ontology of social subjectivation.

David I. Shyovitz. A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 325 pp.

Reviewed by: A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz by David I. Shyovitz David Malkiel David I. Shyovitz. A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 325 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400941800065X Historical scholarship of the past few decades has sought to liberate the image of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry from the grip of Wissenschaft thinking, which portrayed it as xenophobic and ignorant. David Shyovitz's A Remembrance of His Wonders takes this scholarly movement in a new direction. Shyovitz argues that far from shunning the natural order, the German Pietists reflected deeply on natural phenomena that inspire marvel because they appear to defy explanation. The Pietists, chiefly Judah the Pious, collected these wonders in texts that often begin with "a remembrance of His wonders" (Psalm 111:4), in order to derive theological conclusions from seemingly aberrant forces of nature. The theological import derived from remembrances revolves around God's existence and omnipotence, and typically is learned a minore ad maius, from the physical order to the recondite divine realm. Shyovitz interprets these lessons propounded by the Pietists as implying a powerful current of skepticism among the rank and file of medieval Ashkenaz, which also challenges the traditional historiographical image. Indeed, Jeremy Cohen and Avraham Grossman have put forward similar arguments in different contexts, and yet I can imagine the Pietists propagating material of this sort for the edification and spiritual well-being of their audience without conjuring an atmosphere involving a crisis of faith. The interrogation of nature through its wonders is a familiar trope from the travel writing of Gerald of Wales and others, which treats home-bound readers to descriptions of bizarre creatures encountered at the geographical limits of the world, liminal phenomena in liminal locales. Thinking about events and behaviors that lie at the edge of the natural realm offered a way to conceptualize the natural [End Page 465] order and where its boundaries fall. Thus, the interest the Pietists show in the workings of nature situates them squarely in the context of medieval science, which, as Lynn Thorndike has shown, did not distinguish between science and magic, the natural and occult. More startling is the Pietists' methodology, which combines observation and experimentation. They instruct readers how to produce certain results, and their thinking is refreshingly modern for not being rooted in the classical tomes of Aristotle, Galen, and others. Judah the Pious takes his place among Albert the Great and other medieval thinkers whose empiricism anticipated the scientific revolution. A Remembrance of His Wonders also posits a high degree of cultural integration, with knowledge of the natural order—including the occult—derived not only from rabbinic tradition (e.g., sources about magnets, salamanders, etc.), but also from contemporary Christian writings, including bestiaries, lapidaries, encyclopedias, and "books of secrets." Once again, the book confounds the image of Ashkenazic Jewry as insular, although Yitzhak Baer, Joseph Dan, and others have suggested possible connections to Berthold of Regensburg or Caesarius of Heisterbach and acknowledged the presence of Germanic folklore in the Pietists' writings. Remembrances from the natural world are the subject of the first chapter; the remaining four focus on the human being, especially the body. We are thus cautioned that the Pietists' well-known asceticism does not imply disdain for the body; rather, the idea of man as microcosm stimulates intense scrutiny of the body's form and processes, from which the Pietists derive practical advantage, such as for divination or to fashion a golem. This fascination with the human form seems to sit well with the Ashkenazic tradition of divine corporealism, a tradition closely associated with Moses Taku, though true also for Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières. Shyovitz's overall thesis of intense Ashkenazic acculturation is supported here by evidence that the microcosm idea circulated widely in twelfth-century Europe, at the cathedral school of Chartres or, closer to home, in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. We are also treated to sources from visual art, including the Noah Window of the Chartres Cathedral (fig. 8). The Pietists' theory of the soul supports Shyovitz's argument about their interest in...

Realist Research Design and Evaluation for Integrated Care SIG (RIC) - Part 2: Realist Quantitative Methods for Integrated Care Design and Evaluation

Background: Realist research methodology is increasingly being used for the design and evaluation of integrated care initiatives. Much of current realist research and evaluation is qualitative in nature and yet many realist methodologists, including Pawson, Tilley, Sayer and Olsen, have argued for the use of mixed methods. There remains much debate regarding the role of quantitative methods, including statistics, within a critical realist philosophical framework. For many realist researchers the use of quantitative methods is both a philosophical and methodological stumbling block. Yet quantitative methods can contribute to realist theory building,, design and theory testing through their ability to use observable events to infer the existence of underlying mechanisms and to detect changes in both context and outcomes. This workshop will examine debates about the use of quantitative methods in realist research and evaluation, either as part of a mixed-method design or on their own. Examples of their use for both theory development and theory testing will be provided. The workshop will provide practical demonstration of the use of quantitative methods for both small and large scale studies. Knowledge, techniques and practices to be addressed include: The philosophical debates concerning the use of quantitative methods for realist research and evaluation Quantitative methods used for explanatory theory building research Construction of quantitative tools from qualitative data Quantitative methods used for evaluation and theory testing Application of quantitative methods within realist mixed method study designs Practical application of quantitative analysis to infer mechanistic action. By the conclusion of the workshop, participants should be able to: Understand the philosophical rejection of quantitative methods for both natural and social scientific realms Determine how to interpret quantitative methods and incorporate them into realist research and evaluation while maintaining a distinction between method and methodology Describe quantitative methods for inclusion in realist mixed method research and/or evaluation study designs Undertake practical realist analysis of quantitative study data using simple statistical methods. Aims and Objectives: 1) To examine debates about the use of quantitative methods in realist research and evaluation, either as part of a mixed-method design or on their own. 2) To demonstrate the use of realist quantitative methods for both integrated care design and evaluation. Format: 90 minutes, one speaker and facilitator, Group work at tables using problem-based learning. Discussion, debate and learning resources. Target Audience: Integrated care design and evaluation practitioners and researchers. Qualitative and quantitative researchers. Mixed methodologists. Learning and Takeaway: Increased understanding of how quantitative methods can be appropriately used with realist methodology. Introduction to the use of advanced quantitative methods for design and evaluation of integrated care initiatives including latent class analysis, latent variable pathways, and discontiuity quasiexperimental designs.

Crossing Borders in Irish Drama and Theatre. Art, Artist and Sacrifice

Abstract Among the infinite variety of borders crossed in the theatre – social, national, cultural, gender, generic, aesthetic, existential, and many others – this essay focuses on self-reflexive border-crossings in Irish kunstlerdrama (artist-drama) and theatre. Spanning over eighty years, in selected plays from W. B. Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934), through Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979), Frank McGuinness’s The Bird Sanctuary (1994) and Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (1999), to Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk (2014), a few forms of theatrical representation of transgressing and/or dissolving boundaries are explored while attempting to delienate which borders need to be respected, which contested, abolished, and then which to be transcended. Artist figures or artworks within drama, embodying the power to move or mediate between different realms of reality, including art and nature, stage and auditorium, life and death, reveal that sacrificial death proves crucial still in a non-sacrificial age, in enabling the artist and/or instigating spiritual fertility. In addition to his/her role, function, potential in affecting social and spiritual life, the representation of the artist necessarily reflects on theatre’s art seeking its own boundaries and opening itself to embrace the audience.

“Speaking with the Fire”: The Inquisition Confronts Mesoamerican Divination to Treat Child Illness in Sixteenth-Century Guatemala

Abstract Indigenous midwives and female healers who treated infants and children in late-sixteenth-century Guatemala were medico-religious specialists who mediated the natural and supernatural realms to treat child illness. Their socially critical roles are examined through the lens of an Inquisition investigation in the tributary Maya town of Samayaq in colonial Central America into indigenous and mixed race women’s use of divination as a strategy to treat child illness, and in particular mollera caída, or fallen fontanel.

Don’t be afraid! Persuasive Practices in the Wild

Advisory service encounters evolve from providing expertise to joint problem-solving. Additionally, advisees depend on persuasion, which drives them to follow the advisor’s recommendations. However, advisors can be insufficiently equipped to persuade, resulting in advisees who are incapable of action or are unmotivated. Persuasive technology (PT) research proves that technology can motivate and enable people in single-user scenarios but pays limited attention to the natural realm of persuasion: the face-to-face conversation. This paper explores how persuasive technology transforms advice giving, a collaborative scenario involving an expert and a layperson. In such scenarios, IT does not act as a persuader but can provide affordances for persuasive practices, i.e., suggest new practices or enhance existing ones for convincing the advisee without deception or enforcement. We investigate the advisory practices in 24 real burglary prevention service encounters supported by IT. The paper shows the persuasive practices emerging through appropriation of the system, the tensions that govern the adoption or transformation of specific practices and routines and it confirms that studying the use and appropriation of technology uncovers organizational conflicts and tensions affecting such fundamental aspects as the advisor’s role and job description.

Aristotelian Interpretations by Fran O’Rourke (review)

after the 1921 Treaty and retired from politics to take up a judicial position. While he was a brilliant leader in promoting opposition to the government by all means, including treason, in at attempt to defeat Home Rule, he was a dismal failure as a minister in the war time coalition governments. He was essentially more a rabble-rouser than a statesman. Given his lack of real affection for the Northern Irish state, there is something deeply ironic about the fact that the larger than life-size statue of him, erected in his own lifetime in front of the parliament building at Stormont, symbolises the fact that Northern Ireland is essentially Carson’s creation. By contrast, Redmond remains an almost forgotten man in nationalist Ireland, despite the fact that the parliamentary democracy that emerged in Dublin is far closer to his dream of an independent, tolerant, Ireland than the visions of the 1916 leaders. It is also arguable that Redmond would be far happier with the way history turned out for what is now the Irish Republic, than Carson was with his creation. Redmond’s big regret would be that partition has divided the island for a century and is likely to do so for many years to come. Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1906 to 1916, who worked so closely with Redmond to try and deliver Home Rule, noted in his memoirs published in the 1920s how the young men who formed the government of the Free State did not appreciate ‘how they had entered into their inheritance by the efforts and great personal sacrifice and risks of that Irish Parliamentary Party which they have since flung upon the scrap-heap of history. Politicians seldom desire gratitude and never get it’. In Redmond’s case that is certainly true. Stephen Collins has recently retired as political editor of The Irish Times, to which he continues to contribute on a regular basis. Aristotelian Interpretations, Fran O’Rourke (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016), 366 pages. Who is the greatest philosopher who ever lived? Many might hesitate to answer such a question, Fran O’Rourke does not. For him Aristotle is, without any doubt, the holder of that title. This book substantiates the claim. Summer 2018: Book Reviews Studies • volume 107 • number 426 234 The magnanimity and comprehensiveness of Aristotle’s dictum that ‘every realm of nature is marvellous’ sums up O’Rourke’s conviction and describes also his own connaturality with his hero. The maxim also serves as an underlying and unifying motif for this volume of original essays. Aristotelian Interpretations considers themes of perennial interest, offering new avenues of interpretation, illustrating how Aristotle’s thought may be creatively applied to a variety of timeless and contemporary questions. Each chapter concerns itself with central themes of metaphysics, aesthetics, political anthropology, ethics and epistemology. The result is a panoramic survey of Aristotle’s philosophy showing that, far from being just a figure of historical interest living over two thousand years ago, this remarkable thinker provides us with a vision which is applicable and relevant. While many of Aristotle’s empirical presuppositions are obviously out of date, science having taken such gigantic strides in the meantime, his deeper intuitions and unrivalled wisdom have perennial validity. Aristotle’s philosophy, as well as being comprehensive and profound, is noted for its common sense, its belief in and reverence for nature, and its overall confidence in the human mind’s capacity to discover and to formulate truth. Those who might find it somewhat flat, dull and forbidding might risk a preliminary glance through Aristotle’s Ethics; reminding themselves that such an apparent banality is the result of the total absorption of such thought into our cultural bloodstream. Aristotle’s books have become the warp and woof of life as we were born into it. They formed the shape and fabric of the cultural shelter woven around us. That is why this book by Fran O’Rourke is such a godsend. ‘We are the only animals who can be happy . . . Morality and virtue are personal . . . and virtue depends upon ourselves’, this author tells us in his introduction, echoing the master he has been studying all...

Environmental Effects of Road Salting

Humans in contact with less-than-favourable environments are constantly exerting control over those natural realms to make them more hospitable and functional for our everyday life. A prime example of such an exertion, and the focus of this research, is that of salting our sidewalks and roads to make transit safer for both pedestrians and vehicles. However, as is common with many anthropogenic practices, when out of sight we often pay little thought to the consequences of this action, and the potential environmental harm is effectively out of mind. Accordingly, the objective of our research project is to observe how ecosystems are being affected by road salt and its effect on local flora and fauna. This is a local issue that could effectively be extrapolated to a more global scale.The planned approach was to first do an exhaustive search for the current literature on this topic, diving into the primary literature, effectively bringing researchers up to speed on the science behind this issue. Next we wanted to contact local authorities, such as the City of Kingston to understand more about local salting initiatives. Finally based on what we know about both the local situation and potentially harmful effects that salting our roads may have on the environment, formulate a set of recommendations to improve both the salting and the surrounding natural environment.

Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths

Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths