Realm Of Nature Research Articles

Degrees of Connection: A Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Mutual Disinterest

John Rawls's solution to the problem of justice between generations is premised on the idea that “a generation cares for its immediate descendants, as fathers say care for their sons” (John Rawls 1971: 288, emphasis added). This paper brings mothers into the Rawlsian social contract. I argue that, when children have more than one parent, there is a contradiction between the assumption of concern for descendants, which underpins Rawls's account of justice between generations, and the mutual disinterest assumption, which characterizes parties negotiating in the “original position.” Concern for descendants creates connections within generations as well as across generations. The critique is internal and nonradical, but its implications are subversive. It demonstrates that an “add women and stir” liberal feminist reworking of Rawls's theory cannot be successful; bringing sexual reproduction out of the realm of nature and into the social contract necessitates a radical reconstruction of Rawls's theory.

The Eucharist before Nature and Culture

This article examines the claim by Bruno Latour that the modern division between the realms of nature and culture is in collapse. Following Latour, the division of nature and culture is located within a “modern constitution” which also includes the bracketing of God and a non‐theological ontology. Technology is examined as a means of overcoming the chaotic collapse of the dualism of nature and culture. Particular reference is made to the work of Donna Haraway. However, it is argued that technology, in being mimetic, is not able to re‐configure the relationship between nature and culture. Instead, through a comparison of the theologies of John Calvin and St. Thomas Aquinas, nature and culture are seen to be reconfigured in a non‐mimetic understanding of the Eucharist in which the natural and cultural elements of the Church's liturgy reach their telos through participation in the divine life.

Kevin Kelly’s Complexity Theory

Regarded as a contemporary prophet of the new technology and economy, Kevin Kelly argues that the realms of nature and human construction are becoming one. Human-made things are becoming more lifelike, and life is becoming more engineered. In this future world, control is dispersed in highly pluralistic, open, and decentralized systems. Natural, technological, economic, and social elements of the system coevolve toward a superior, neobiological civilization that will foster bottom-up control, coordinated change, and cooperation among all elements. The authors contest Kelly’s metaphysics of the new economy and technologies, arguing that he illicitly collapses technology and the economy into nature, using nature metaphors to legitimate the new forms of economy and organization. The authors argue that Kelly fails to factor in the logic of capital into his scenario and fails to explore the consequences of the new organization of economy and new technology for the environment and society.

It's a Very Private Picture

Michael D. Hall In the weeks since Bert Hemphill passed away in May of last year, I've spent considerable time thinking about this very special man and his influence on my life. Remembering Bert, I suddenly saw, in my mind's eye, one of the most paintings in his collection-Stag at Echo Rock. It is work that Bert referred to as a very private picture. My epiphany was the realization that in expressing my own private interpretation of this picture, I might publicly share my lasting impressions of Bert Hemphill and his many gifts. Stag is classic late-nineteenth-century folk art painting by an unknown artist. It depicts buck deer standing in the middle of country road that winds around rock formation, turns across bridge over small stream, and disappears into the woods beyond. At the lower right of the painting, the heads of two harnessed horses tentatively intrude into the scene. Winter snow blankets the landscape and the startled buck stands stiff legged in the center of the composition. Staring out at the viewer, the deer seems uncertain whether to freeze in the path of the oncoming horses, or to flee from them. Bert's favorite adjectives were wonderful and marvelous. He used them both every time he talked about Stag at Echo Rock. For it is, indeed, picture that inspires wonder, and one that prompts us to marvel at the inventive originality present in the best folk art. Bert profoundly identified with this painting and referred to it as one of the crown jewels of his collection. On another level, perhaps he understood it as visual metaphor for the whole of folk art. We will never really know what he saw, but revisiting this painting we can remember the Bert Hemphill I knew and loved-a man utterly absorbed in his own never-ending enterprise of self-invention and self-discovery. In my view, the deer that dominates Stag at Echo Rock is one of those awesome prototypical figures that ties folk art to the very nascence of art itself. The stag evokes our real and imagined memories of the bison and deer that swirl across the cave ceilings at Lascaux. The stag represents everything Bert admired in primitive art. It appears at Echo Rock like phantom-a creature like the unicorn, more fantastic than real. The stag is much like Bert: shy, elegant, magical. The stag is folk art the way Bert talked about it: mysterious, powerful, nimble, and elusive. There are other metaphors at work as well in the painting, particularly the tangled forest and the road. The road intrudes human presence and purpose into the landscape. The forest signals the mystery of nature-the natural realm where instinct rules. Bert loved art history and the control that great artists bring to their aesthetic endeavors-

Secularism, unicity and diversity: The case of Haracandi's grove

This paper argues that secularism as a concept and practice arose from the need in 16th and 17th century Europe to create a neutral space making possible intra- as well as inter-State discourse. This neutral space was from the beginning part of the emerging scientific revolution; it transposed in a different key the dogmatic unicity of the two warring religious denominations. Secular science created the 'sacred/spiritual' as an other-worldly domain totally separate from this-worldly realms of nature and society. By looking at an important festival in coastal Orissa taking place in a so-called 'sacred grove', the paper argues that the category of sacred thus wielded does violence to a different reality where unicity and the sacred/secular dichotomy, among others, are not found. Rather than essentialist categories, local practice conjures a dynamic, shifting, alternating reality, in which no single principle or reality dominates. The paper argues that unicity is lethal to diversity and that secular nation-states have everywhere adopted science as both a strengthening and legitimising tool, thus endangering diversity. Newly emergent religious 'fundamentalisms' negatively mirror the unicity of the secular nation-state, whereas much of local practice retains its diversity-generating ways of life.

‘Nature’ as a Promise of Happiness: Farmers’ Wives in the Area of Ammerland, Germany

In this qualitative study about the culture and counterculture of farmers’ wives, seventeen women were interviewed over the course of three years. The premise on which the analysis of there interviews was carried out was that they had to be taken as ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein) of individual self‐descriptions. The material was used to extract individual collages of consciousness. The question was how it is possible to direct one’s behaviour in a way that is different from the usual in the sense that one not only fulfils duties and normative expectations but is also able to experience and live desires, temptations, fantasies. It appeared that these women view themselves as ‘seekers of knowledge’ with particular world views and concerned with specific questions of meaning. Cultural change was traced in the realms of work, bodily attitudes, food and nature. One crucial result is that culture has no continuity for these women, but must be permanently re‐established.

Sensitivities of Report Writing for Weak-Rock Projects

Weak rock is the natural realm of geological engineers and engineering geologists. We are the best equipped geotechnical professionals to deal effectively with these difficult and generally complex earth materials, and we have the obligation to produce the most informative technical reports possible in weak-rock assignments. Because of the strength-related problems of weak rock, we should remain cognizant of the need to emphasize several aspects of our reports. For this purpose weak rock occurs because of one or more strength-degrading considerations: Weak to deleterious lithology; the latter imparting damaging characteristics to concretes and to rock utilized as rip-rap and other forms of shore protection. Mineral alteration and/or weathering. Intensely debilitating geologic structure, leading to unstable ground for surface cuts and structures and as host ground for underground openings. Disruptive human action, mainly from mining, whereas the weak characteristics are those of the previously-mined ground.

Beyond Stewardship? Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Nature

This article questions whether the model of stewardship is helpful in considering Christian responsibility towards non‐human nature and proposes a different way of treating the issue of care of the environment. In an extended engagement with the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the article argues that human relations to non‐human nature are best understood by seeing humanity as historical, political and natural. In theological formulation, humanity must be understood asimago dei, imago civitatis andimago mundi. Therefore the place of humanity cannot properly be understood without reference to both God and nature. Humanity, nature and God thereby constitute a ‘common realm’. A new test of Christian responsibility towards non‐human nature is introduced: of primary interest is how historical, political and natural humanity acts in ways which either reveal or obscure the ‘common realm of God, nature and humanity’. At this point, theological self‐understanding moves beyond the model of stewardship.

The Rational Soul in Iamblichus' Philosophy

JJ?. Finamore: The Rational Soul in Iamblichus' Philosophy 163 The Rational Soul in Iamblichus' Philosophy John F. Finamore It is well known that Iamblichus insisted on a special position for the human soul. It is separate from Intellect and the other higher souls, and holds an intermediate position between them and nature below.1 But if the human soul is entirely separate from Intellect, how does the soul unite with it? If it does so through an intellectual component of its own, how is this psychic ???? different from the higher ???? and how does this conception of ???? differ from that of Plotinus? Iamblichus lays out his theory in the De Anima and, to some degree, in the De Mysteriis and in the fragments of his Platonic commentaries. In this paper, I wish to examine this theory of the soul and see how Iamblichus' solution is consistent. Iamblichus thought that Plotinus and other Platonists did not adequately differentiate the Intellect from the human soul.2 In In Timaeum, frg. 87, we are told that Iamblichus argued against Plotinus' opinion that there is "in us something impassible (?tta??? t?) that always thinks (?e? ?????)" (lines 8-9). Iamblichus argues that if there were this highest part of our soul, we would be perfectly happy at every moment. Rather, Iamblichus concludes, the whole human soul descends from the higher levels into this lowest realm of nature. "For if the ???? is this [highest part], it does not concern the soul. But if it is part of the soul, the rest [of us] is also happy" (lines 20-21). Further, Iamblichus says, we learn from the Phaedrus that the highest part of the soul descends as well.3 Thus, Iamblichus concludes that the 1 I have discussed this issue in the first chapter of J.F. Finamore, Iamblichus and the Theory ofthe Vehicle ofthe Soul (Chico 1985) 1 1-32. 2 See the works cited in Finamore (above, note 1) 92-94. See also CG. Steel, The Changing Self: A Study on the Soul in Later Platonism (Brussels 1978) 34-38, and RAl. Berchman, "Rationality and Ritual in Plotinus and Porphyry," Incognita 2 (1991) 189-200. 3 On this fragment, see lamblichi Chalcidensis in Platonis Diálogos Commentariorum Fragmenta, JAl. Dillon, ed. and trans. (Leiden 1973) 382-3, and Steel (above, note 2) 40-45. 164Syllecta Classica 8 (1997) whole human soul sinks to the level of nature, that none of it remains above, and that ???? is separate from the human soul.4 What then is this highest part of the human SOUl if it is not ????? Iamblichus is interested in this same problem in his De Anima. In De Anima 318.12-15, Iamblichus discusses the intellect:5 Many of the Platonists themselves introduce the intellect into the soul at the same time as the first entry of soul into body, and they do not differentiate at all between the soul and its intellect. In De Anima 365.5-366.1 1 , Iamblichus states who these Platonists are and compares his own beliefs to theirs.6 These Platonists say that all souls are made from one 4 Van den Berg in his paper in this collection (pages 149-162) has questioned whether we can use this fragment from Proclus' Timaeus commentary as evidence for Iamblichus' own views. Van den Berg sets out an intriguing argument that (1) whereas this fragment states that the highest part of the soul is the charioteer (???????), Iamblichus believed that the highest part was the helmsman (??ße???t??), which was for him the soul's One (In Phaedrus, frg. 6) and (2) whereas here the soul is affected by the descent, Iamblichus held that some souls were unaffected. I will return to the second point later. As to the first, there are three possible ways to accept the fragment as evidence for Iamblichus' beliefs. First, when Iamblichus discusses matters that are beyond human ken (the One, the gods, intellect), his vocabulary is flexible and suited to the argument at hand. Thus, in De Mysteriis 1.15, Iamblichus calls this highest element t? ?e??? èv ?µ?? ?a? ??e??? ?a? Iv, ? e? ???t?? a?t? ?a???? ??????? ("the divine, intellectual, and one in us—or if...

Nature Conservation in England and Germany 1900–70: Forerunner of Environmental Protection?

Nature plays a significant role in the discussion for and against modernism, which got under way from the late eighteenth century onwards. The rationalists of the Enlightenment considered not only human nature, but also the whole uncultivated realm of nature beyond, that of the animals and plants, as wild and dangerous. It should, according to them, be tamed for the benefit of mankind and put to use. Thus they laid the ideological foundations that made possible the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources for the free development of the market and specifically for industrialisation, ie for material and ideological modernisation processes. The Romantics, on the other hand, emphasised the importance of non-material values. In their view the inherent and irretrievable beauty of nature should not be sacrificed on the altar of utilitarianism. A century later the critics of unrestrained economic modernisation expanded on the Romantics' view. They criticised the ‘tumours’ of industrialisation, urbanisation and materialism, advocating greater preservation of the wilderness and, indeed, of agrarian land and the rural way of life. For them, such things were not just symbols of originality, beauty and health, but were also part of the ‘national character’. They were unique treasures, unlike replaceable material interests. Nature, as a source of raw materials, became a multifunctional cultural heritage. ‘Materialism’ and the idea of progress, the central characteristics of modernisation, were challenged by criticism of civilisation and by historicism. Thus the basic cultural and political camps were established, but also the decisive ideological preconditions for the emergence of a nature conservation movement.

Ghosts and Spirits in the Sung Neo-Confucian World: Chu Hsi on kuei-shen

Most scholarship on Chu Hsi has been devoted to explicating his influential Neo-Confucian metaphysics, and espacially his understanding of the two central concepts of li and ch'i. Little attention, however, has been paid to the role played by ghosts and spirits (kuei-shen) in this metaphysics. Yet the record of his conversations with disciples and his collected writings reveal a Chu Hsi who not only professes a profound belief in the existence of ghosts and spirits but also attempts throughout much of his life to explain their fundamental nature, to make them intelligible. For Chu, spirit beings, like all other things in the universe, are explicable in terms of an inherent li and their particular allotment of ch'i and, as such, are part of our understandable world, indeed natural to it. In this way, Chu incorporates spirit beings into an articulated, coherent world-view. The conventional boundaries between the natural and spirit realms that prevail in the West would thus seem to have little relevance in Chu Hsi's philosophical vision, where the two realms are intermingled and indistinguishable

Editorial

Perhaps it might be best to begin here, with the particularities of the space in which UnderCurrents is produced. In its rather desultory isolation from the intensities of the city of Toronto, and its somewhat ironic "distance" from the mythos of the wild, UnderCurrents is both figuratively and literally situated at a juncture between the realms of culture and nature. For readers familiar with this journal, part of what we have attempted to negotiate over the years has been some of the conceptual boundaries which work to bracket and divide these intimately inseparable realms. In essence, UnderCurrents has sought to define something of a liminal, in-between space from which to consider various problematics of nature and the "natural". This project exists in what is strictly speaking, the 'suburban.' York University happens at edges of both Canada's largest metropolis and the nation's most densely populated and highly 'cultivated' cottage and farm country. Beside the woodlot stands the mall, and within this nexus, we sit in a three-story, neatly partitioned, sealed glass building which houses the Faculty of Environmental Studies . Needless to say, this site is full of contradictions. And yet there is, most definitely, a here here. Like any place, it has its pleasures, conditions of power, regulatory structures and regimes, deprivations, excesses and economies. As such, and in consideration of its multitude of contradictions, we find this to be an apropos site from which to instantiate some discussions about an equally contradictory figure we initially termed, and perhaps now, after putting this journal together, can only provisionally call, "natural space".

The Christian Philosopher (review)

Reviewed by: The Christian Philosopher Kerry S. Walters The Christian Philosopher, by Cotton Mather; edited by Winton U. Solberg; cxlii & 488 pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, $49.95. Poor Cotton Mather! For well over two centuries now he has been a popular icon of unctuous self-righteousness, superstitious fanaticism, and dogmatic intolerance. Nor has endorsement of this stereotype been confined to casual laypersons who know of Mather only from lurid accounts of Salem witch-hunting. Scholars who ought to know better often buy into it. Perry Miller, the doyen of early American studies, consistently wrote of Mather in a particularly unsympathetic manner. More odious, as Professor Solberg reminds us (p. xciii), was the treatment by historians at a Florida planetarium who in 1982 put together a short film on early European and American doomsday predictors which included segments on Mather the astronomer. When these segments appeared, a projector was programmed to flash the words “Feel Free to Boo and Hiss” on the planetarium’s dome—an invitation which audiences, presumably, gleefully accepted. Mather deserves better than this, and Winton Solberg’s critical edition of The Christian Philosopher goes a long way towards rehabilitating the Puritan divine. Along with recent studies such as Kenneth Murdock’s edition of Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1977) and Kenneth Silverman’s masterful The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1984), Solberg’s study painstakingly presents us with a detailed account of a man who undoubtedly was one of the most important literary figures in early America. Mather published The Christian Philosopher in 1721, seven years before his [End Page 167] death and eight years after being named to the Royal Society of London. The book was both the culmination of a lifetime of learning as well as a calculated effort on Mather’s part to show that his election to the prestigious Royal Society was deserved. The book is the first attempt by an American-born author to take a comprehensive look at the “new learning” associated with that period known since as the Enlightenment. Mather was an omnivorous reader and an equally thorough observer of natural phenomena, and he welcomed the scientific interpretations of reality offered by such savants as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and John Ray. In the mind of Mather, such explanations posed no challenge to the Christian worldview. On the contrary, he concluded, they supported it by providing clear and indisputable evidence of design in nature. The Christian Philosopher (or, in more contemporary jargon, The Christian Scientist) is Mather’s attempt to defend this thesis. It is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting!) compendium of data gleaned from the natural realm which, in Mather’s judgment, irrefutably points to the existence of a grand Designer. Although Mather explicitly claimed that his primary goal in writing the book was to demonstrate that atheism is contrary to reason, he also penned one of the New World’s first systematic Enlightenment documents. One of the difficulties in reading The Christian Philosopher traditionally has been the sheer breadth of learning that went into its composition. Mather cites over four hundred books, includes hundreds of allusions to classical and scriptural sources, and so inundates the reader with evidence in support of his fundamental design argument that it is quite easy to lose one’s way. Professor Solberg has considerably lightened these burdens with his critical edition. He prefaces Mather’s text with a masterful 115-page introduction which places the work in its historical context as well as analyzes its methodology and arguments. Moreover, his edition includes 170 pages of endnotes, biographical notes, biblical references and a recapitulation of Mather’s own sources. Finally, Solberg supplies almost each page of Mather’s text with footnotes that identify literary or scriptural allusions and translate Mather’s liberal use of Greek and Latin quotations. Solberg’s edition of The Christian Philosopher will prove, I’m confident, to be the definitive text. It is an invaluable reference tool for the specialist, but it can also serve as a friendly and intriguing introduction for the layperson. Convinced Puritan-bashers who read this study may still regard Mather’s worldview with distaste, but I suspect that Solberg’s sensitive...

El condenado por presumido: The Rhetoric of Death and Damnation in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra

An examination of the rhetoric of death and damnation in Tirso's Burlador reveals that the play can be read as a dramatized homily about the natural and supernatural realms of God's justice, reflected in the work's natural and supernatural realms of action. Concerning the rhetoric of damnation, much traditional criticism about the Burlador has centered on whether Tirso adopts either a "Thomist" or "Molinist" position concerning the De auxiliis controversy; and on why, or even whether, Don Juan is consigned to hell. Such hermeneutic disputes can be resolved by recognizing that the protagonist is damned for presumption, which all orthodox theology of the period considered to be, like despair, a sin against the theological virtue of hope and, hence, an "unpardonable" sin against the Holy Spirit. As spelled out most systematically in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae , the theology of presumption acts as a referential code for the mechanism of Don Juan's damnation, and thus for Tirso's rendering of the supernatural (eternal) realm of God's justice. In the natural (temporal) realm of God's justice, the matching of "punishment" and "crime" holds equally for the protagonist and his victims. After discussing the crime and punishment of each victim in turn, this study examines how both realms of divine justice converge in the character of the protagonist. His sentence of death for his crimes against other human beings, together with his sentence of damnation for his sin against hope and the Holy Spirit, jointly dramatize the the play's central, "anagogical" theme: that a God who is at once just and merciful exacts from any infraction of either the temporal or eternal order a terrible, fitting price. Lastly, the theological position put forth in Tirso's homiletic play is shown to stand outside the academic debate between "Thomists" and "Molinists" about grace and free will.

Single planet, divided world

Unlike other forms of life on planet earth, humans have contrived to flourish—or at least multiply—by splitting themselves horizontally into incommensurable units and vertically into a species above, or privileged within, the realm of nature. The human proclivity for division, exclusion, and alienation is not absolute; it is endlessly challenged and often diluted by integrating tendencies. Historically, phenomena such as Christianity and liberalism have been divisive from some perspectives and integrating from others. But although we have examples of extreme fragmentation, we have none of extreme integration. This tendency cannot be unconditionally lamented. It has stimulated admirable achievements in art, religion, politics, and science. The innovations of the ancient Greeks, for example, which were sustained by their contempt for non‐Greeks, undergird many laudable features of Western culture. But this cannot vindicate humankind's divisiveness. Some of the world's most distinctive fragments—blacks, women, slaves, refugees—have made breathtakingly noble and creative contributions to humankind while enduring indefensible conditions of exclusion and misery. Division is not a synonym for diversity. Natural variables—climate, geography, genes—produce diversity in the human species. In itself such diversity is neither good nor bad; it is inevitable. It is the ways in which we choose to value and politicize diversity that are good or bad. Sadly, instead of regarding diversity as an invaluable resource available for the enrichment of all, we have instead subjected it to the divisive and impoverishing logics of domination and arrogance, and embedded it in a thousand “unnatural” categories manufactured by giving free rein to our deepest anxieties and fears. Today we are witnessing divisive forces among humans on a scale almost impossible to describe, let alone theorize. We have become so removed from the realm of nature that we need armies of scientists to determine how we might recreate a sustainable mode of existence. The work of feminists has revealed the extent to which gender relations have been socially constructed to particularize and oppress women throughout the world. The promise of capitalism has been challenged by the escalating disparities within and between rich and poor countries. Religion has inspired groups to adopt strategies of uncritical violence toward outsiders. Race and ethnicity, often projected into the vague modern concept of nationalism, generate bloody conflict on every continent. Refugees, cast by the insentient logic of the nation‐state into a legal and institutional limbo, subsist on almost nothing, face rejection at every turn, grow in numbers, and remain powerless and humiliated. The injustices of our divided world spawned such virulent criticism and dire predictions in the 1980s that we now are experiencing a potent conservative backlash. It has emerged in “scientific” reassessments of environmental degradation, sophisticated endorsements of market solutions to various human problems, attempts to render feminism unpalatable to women, new promises that the United Nations can succeed while remaining true to its Western mandate, and a tendency to situate racial, ethnic, and religious tensions in the “inherently” unstable landscape of the more “primitive” Third World and post‐Soviet bloc. This backlash may constitute a useful antidote to the enthusiastic but uninformed claims of some critics of the status quo. But it is dangerous insofar as it seeks to assuage fear by describing a past that never existed and by offering a return ticket that cannot be redeemed. At best it will motivate critics to refine their positions and remind us that our history includes victories for peace and justice that should not be forgotten; at worst, it will lull people into ignoring problems that will quietly intensify and reemerge as crises.

Ecstasy and Peak-Experience: W. B. Yeats, Marghanita Laski, and Abraham Maslow

1 COMPABATIVE i ama Volume 28Summer 1994Number 2 Ecstasy and Peak-Experience: W. B. Yeats, Marghanita Laski, and Abraham Maslow Natalie Crohn Schmitt In a world beset by realism, science, and the workaday, W. B. Yeats set about inventing a dramatic form to induce ecstatic experience in his audience and dedicated his long dramatic career to that effect.1 He thought of his art, he said, as but the putting of his faith and the evidence of his faith in words or forms, and his faith was in ecstasy.2 He was, he felt, never so alive as "at the moment when a room full of people share [that] one lofty emotion."3 Ecstatic experiences, as represented in Yeats's plays, their attendant imagery, and their import, are here examined in light of the phenomenological studies of such experiences provided by novelist and critic Marghanita Laski and by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. Marghanita Laski, in a frequently cited 1961 study, examined accounts of 1 14 ecstatic experiences provided her by friends and acquaintances and in published literary and religious works. In her examination, which was confined to those ecstatic experiences recounted as "extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source," she observed that the experiences were generally described in highly imagistic terms. She also noted that there was a limited range of objects, events, 167 168Comparative Drama and ideas that served to trigger them, and that such triggers were usually a necessary though not a sufficient cause of ecstatic experience .4 She observed that what were felt to be qualities of many of the triggers and the experience were causally connected —for instance, that being on the top of a mountain could serve to trigger ecstatic feelings of upliftedness. Following Laski's lead, I wish to look at Yeats's plays—and particularly at their repeated imagery—as such triggers in order to make clear relationships between the images themselves and between images and the ecstatic experience Yeats sought to evoke. The strong correlation between Yeats's representations of ecstatic experience and descriptions provided by Laski's subjects is not surprising. Laski relied on European, primarily English, subjects. Yeats drew his inspiration from a wide range of sources both Eastern and Western, but in the end he chose descriptions and images that seemed both true to him and, he hoped, moving for his English-speaking audience. The principal difference between the accounts of Laski's subjects and Yeats's plays is of course that Laski's subjects were actually in situations that triggered their experience—on top of a windy mountain at sunset, for instance—whereas Yeats only provided images of such experiences. Yeats hoped that if he could intensely realize a state of ecstasy—that is, provide a vision or fable representing the experience of it—he could induce it. Just as "an emotion produces a symbol," he believed, "a symbol produces emotion."5 Seeking always to intensify the realization, what appears in the early plays as mere verbal description often reappears in the later ones in character, action, and setting—which of course are also images. But it is not only Yeats's means that we may question: his very interest in mystical experiences is often regarded as a considerable embarrassment. R. P. Blackmur's response to Yeats's mysticism continues to prevail: "the supernatural is simply not part of our mental furniture," he said, "and when we meet it in our reading we say: Here is debris to be swept away."6 To counter such response, I want to set Yeats's project not only within the context of Laski's study but also within that of one of the founders of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow (190870 ). Maslow, strongly influenced by Laski's study, conducted his own interviews and surveys and came away convinced that ecstatic experiences are more common than our society and, more particularly, psychology acknowledges. Mystic transcendent experiences , he argued, "lie well within the realm of nature," and Natalie Crohn Schmitt169 study of them like that of any other human experience is well within the realm of psychology.7 Like Laski, then, Maslow sought to naturalize ecstatic experience...

Rousseau contre Rameau : musique et nature dans les articles pour l'Encyclopédie et au-delà

Michael O'Dea : Rousseau Against Rameau. Music and Nature in the Encyclopédie Articles and beyond. This study suggests that Rousseau's four hundred articles on music for the Encyclopédie have been unjustly neglected. After sketching Rousseau's musical education and recounting his humiliation by Rameau in 1745, the author goes on to argue that Rousseau devoted considerable energy and skill to sustained attacks on Rameau in these articles. Instances of such attacks, some covert and some relatively open, are given, and it is argued that Rousseau is the first to identify certain weaknesses in Rameau's universal theories. The study ends by suggesting that Rameau's constant evocation of nature leads Rousseau to a contrary view of music as a product of human culture and more generally to delimit narrowly the realm of nature in a way that looks forward to the Second Discourse.

Precis of "The Metaphysics of Meaning"

Naturalism says that everything which exists is a spatio-temporal object belonging to the vast causal realm we call nature. For the naturalist, faith in the progress of science is faith that natural science can, in principle, explain everything. Naturalism dominates philosophy today in much the way linguistic philosophy dominated it earlier in the century. Titles containing naturalized, naturalizing, and naturalistic appear today with much the same frequency that titles containing language, grammar, and meaning appeared during the heyday of linguistic philosophy. Naturalism's hegemony rests on arguments that are widely seen as compelling. The first aim of The Metaphysics of Meaning (henceforth MM) is to show that those arguments in fact have no force. The book's second aim is to formulate a direct argument against naturalism. This double challenge is on behalf of realism (Platonism), the position that there are non-natural, abstract objects (i.e., objects having no spatio-temporal location or causal relations). All of the natural realm is real, but the natural realm is not all of reality. One of the philosophical arguments on which the hegemony of naturalism rests is Wittgenstein's; the other is Quine's. The arguments are different. reflecting differences in what each philosopher took bad-i.e., non-naturalist-philosophy to be and also differences in what each took good-i.e., naturalist-philosophy to be. Wittgenstein's position is a critical form of naturalism. It sees bad philosophy-which includes the mainstream of traditional philosophy-as nonsense arising from misuses of language which put us in the grip of a metaphysical picture of reality. Good philosophy, on his position, is a certain practice of assembling reminders which put the linguistically errant philosopher back on the right track. In contrast, Quine's position is a scientistic form of naturalism. Traditional philosophy is a mixture of good and bad explanation. The bad is pseudo-science or anachronistic science

'In Everything Illegitimate': Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama

In Conan Doyle's story 'The Adventure of the Priory School' Holdernesse Hall, the country seat of that stately patriarch the Duke of Holdernesse, is threatened by a peculiar revenant. Mr James Wilder is to all appearances a modern young man who occupies the mundane post of secretary to the Duke, but he is actually a sinister intruder from the past, whose family tree reaches back, through nineteenth-century melodrama and gothic fiction, to the bastard-figures of Jacobean tragedy.2 An illegitimate son of the Duke, Wilder is a vindictive misfit, bent, like Edmund in King Lear or Spurio in The Revenger's Tragedy, on the displacement of the half-brother whose legitimacy he so bitterly resents. By comparison with his seventeenth-century kin he may appear somewhat colourless: unlike Spurio he does not actually seek to cuckold his father, but is content to sow a fatal discord in his marriage; his conspiracy against the legitimate sibling is limited to kidnapping and blackmail, and the story's only murder is an almost accidental consequence of his accomplice's attempt to avoid pursuit. Nevertheless, this bastard's identity as a dangerous social outsider, an incarnation of the disruptive anti-social energies associated with his begetting, is signified by his name, Wilder.3 It marks him, evidently, as the symbolic denizen of that realm of unredeemed nature, the moor on which Holmes and Watson follow the tracks of his crime. Their task is made more difficult by the fact that Wilder has shod the horses of his kidnap vehicle with shoes 'shaped below with a cloven foot of iron' supposed relics of the 'marauding Barons of Holdernesse in the middle ages'.4 As well as equipping the villain with suitably gothic credentials and stamping him with the cloven-footed mark of the

Folk Taxonomy and Mythology of Birds of Paradise in the New Guinea Highlands

Folk taxonomy and myth have conventionally been treated as disparate provinces of cultural meaning, the one dealing with culturally represented but concrete and objective realities of the natural world, the other with the fantasy world of symbolic cultural constructs. While some convergence between conventional approaches to these phenomena has been mooted (e.g., Colby et al. 1981), actual examples in the ethnographic literature remain limited (among them, Bulmer 1967, 1968; Ellen 1972; Jorgensen 1991). My point of departure is that a recurrent deficiency of much of the literature of folk taxonomies (and on ethnosciences in general) is the concentration on the mundane, pragmatic, objective and positivist, rather than the symbolic and interpretive. This has resulted in methodological rigor and a rich body of ethnographic data that reveal two major theoretical preoccupations: the convergence between folk and scietific taxonomies (e.g., Berlin et al. 1974; Boster et al. 1986; Humm 1977); and the debate concerning the practical origins of taxonomies (e.g., Berlin 1990; Hays 1982; Hunn 1982). I do not advocate counterbalancing the pragmatic and mundane aspects of folk taxonomies simply with attention to mystical dimensions. This parallels the questionable distinction between the sacred and profane in anthropological studies of religion, an approach arguably rooted in Western cultural constructs, and is therefore liable to misrepresent other cultural universes. Rather, I adopt the perspective that folk taxonomy and myth are not necessarily separate provinces of meaning, but are elements of more embracing cosmologies. Both myth and folk taxonomy are cultural representations of a collective apprehension of order and regularity--a sense of comprehension--that the human mind discerns in the discontinuities of the realms of society and nature. Here I seek to analyze the intersection of the representations of Birds of Paradise among the Maring of New Guinea, as discernable in the folk taxonomy of the birds and associated discourse on ethno-ornithological lore, and in mythology in which the birds figure prominently. This analysis highlights the symbolic connection between birds and humans, a connection that is evident in everyday Maring discourse on birds, and elaborated upon and metaphorized in myth. I suggest that for the Maring, and indeed, many other Melanesians, animals stand both collectively and in the identity of particular species, as metaphors for the human condition. Birds seem to be particularly singled out for symbolic manipulation (Bulmer 1967; Feld 1982; Healey 1985, 1988, 1991). Why this should be the case is too big a question to address here. But in brief I suggest that two particular features of birds impress themselves on the human observer in New Guinea: the diversity and brilliance of plumage; and the prominence of bird song. Melanesians of my acquaintance are alert to the fleeting movement of birds and the sound of their voices in the dark forest; birds embolden the world in a way quite unlike the retiring character of New Guinea mammals, and their vocalizations are among natural sounds that most approximate human speech (cf. Feld 1982). Certainly, birds in general, and particulary Birds of Paradise, have captured the attention of the Maring. This is evidenced in various aspects of Maring culture. Many individuals accumulate impressively detailed and accurate knowledge of bbird behavior and ecology, much of it based on personal observation(2). Birds feature prominently in mythology and stories, and avian imagery is a notable feature of Maring body decorations, poetics, jokes, and personal names. Finally, birds are important in the local economy, primarily as the focus of intensive hunting of plume-bearing birds for decorations and to supply the traditional plume-trade (Healey 1990). THE MARING There are some 8,000 Maring-speaking people(3) distributed in the Simbai and Jimi Valleys on the slopes of the Western Bismarck Mountains on the northern fringe of Papua New Guinea's central highlands. …