Philosophical Voice Research Articles

Между прошлым и будущим: тема несвоевременности философа в мире

The article aims to analytically recognize the essence of philosophical existence, which, with a careful look, reveals such a quality as the untimely stay of a philosopher in the world. Numerous examples show that this quality is not exceptional, but belongs to the whole philosophy, no matter what schools or continents were discussed. The problem posed in existentialism is, in fact, initially characteristic of philosophical creativity, as evidenced by many texts of classical and modern philosophers. Untimeness has such accompanying qualities as misunderstanding, lack of attention to thoughts and prophecies, as well as to analytical conclusions. The article states that the untimeness is characteristic of philosophical voices in both Russian and Western European philosophy, on which the main emphasis is placed. Philosophy enters into a dialogue with those who think about the fate of the world and its essential qualities. In particular, the work stops at the fact that this feature of philosophy is not negative, but positive, because we are talking about spiritual freedom and a certain form of independence from time and localization in space.

Teaching, learning and philosophising as metaphysical animals: Introduction

Abstract In recent years, a new scholarly gaze has been cast on four women-Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch-who have come to be known as the ‘Wartime Quartet’. During the postwar period, when women were still scarce in the discipline, these four flourished as philosophers. New details about their wartime education give us materials to reflect on what enabled them to develop their unique philosophical voices. Their work dispels widespread philosophical dogmas, especially scientistic interpretations of naturalism that exclude value from the fabric of reality. Through their attention to the details of ordinary life, they avoid flattening the complexities of moral learning, especially where this involves navigating intergenerational differences. The articles in this Suite look to the Wartime Quartet's writings and learning conditions to show that, far from being of purely historical interest, they shed fresh light on the aims and challenges of moral education and offer a critical perspective on current pedagogical practices-particularly in the teaching of philosophy.

Emotion, ethics, epistemology: What can shame 'do'in medical education?

Recent empirical studies have described and theorized a culture of shame within medical education in the Anglo-American context (Bynum). Shame is universal and highly social human emotion characterized by a sense of feeling objectified and judged negatively, in contrast to one's own self-concept. Shame has both an embodied and a relational dimension. Shame is considered especially relevant in healthcare settings (Dolezal and Lyons), and the tenets of patient care within the medical profession include respecting the dignity and upholding the safety of patients. However, shame is frequently deployed as a teaching tool within medical training. Here I ask, what can shame do in medical education (Ahmed)? What epistemic and relational conditions does it construct? I draw from philosophical voices in higher education to illuminate how shaming practices in medical education can undermine dignity safety (Callan), preclude inclusivity, and in the context of the hierarchical and marginalizing medical system, propagate epistemic injustice (Fricker). This argument shows how shame in education can be both phenomenologically and normatively problematic and may act differently upon students who experience marginalization and those who are majoritized. I further suggest that a medical education system which upholds the epistemological and relational frameworks of power, shame, and epistemic injustice, underscores those frameworks in the medical system at large, disserving individual patients who are already at risk of suffering epistemic injustice (Carel), and society at large. This analysis of shame in medical education focuses on the highly relational and interpersonal elements of learning to live and work in the medical system, highlighting the need for respect, trust, and resistance to reorient the relational learning environment toward individual and systemic forms of justice.

Writing Conversationalists into History

Burton Dreben taught a generation of scholars the value of closely attending to the recent philosophical past. But the few papers he authored do little to capture his philosophical voice. In this article, I turn instead to an unpublished transcript of Dreben in conversation with his contemporaries. In addition to yielding insights into a transitional period in W.V. Quine’s and Donald Davidson’s thought, I argue that this document showcases Dreben in his element, revealing the way that he shaped the views of key analytic philosophers. More broadly, I argue that by writing conversationalists like Dreben into our histories we can capture the collaborative nature of philosophy.

Singing Philosophy: Deviating Voices and Rhythms without a Time Signature

AbstractThis text practices a philosophical voice that deviates from visuo-centric theory and the muteness of its language and instead sings a complex simultaneity of things and thoughts that burn through the walls of the discipline and illuminate the activities at the margins. This philosophical voice sings a refrain of “I,” which brings us back to bring us forward, surprising us in its renewal again and again. It is a body that is, as Samuel Beckett’sNot I, at once not I and I; an idiosyncratic subjectivity that carries its plural name in its mouth. In this way, it further diffracts the sonic possibility of counterfactual slices into simultaneous dimensionalities open to our gaze in the dark, when we have let go of a normative orientation and are able to see the image at its depth. Between text scores, Churten theory, Canto Cardenche, and the breath of a humpback whale, this voice tries not to theorise. It does not want to produce a philosophical message, supporting a “philosophism” which akin to “scientism” treats philosophy as a phenomenon unconnected to cultural values or location, gender or racial specificity. Instead, it aims to practice a philosophy that opens in song to its own anxiety of objectivity, its fear of a reflective centre, and performs a translucent marginality that generates the view of a plural world burning through a permeable skin.

Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Getting to the Heart of It

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I was seated in cafés in Paris, intermittently employed as an adjunct professor, and engaged in a struggle to find my professional place and philosophical voice. I lived in this way for almost six years. At present I am a tenured professor at a prestigious French engineering school, seated at my desk and enjoying the sense of well-being and intellectual liberty that such a position provides.

Tango Dancing with María Lugones

Tango Dancing with María Lugones

Mourning and Creativity in Proust by Anna Magdalena Elsner

 Reviews of the visual and the aural in the new field of reportage. e final two chapters are organized not around individual authors but around emergent archetypes in the period, namely the journalist detective (specifically Gaston Leroux’s Rouletabille and Jérôme Fandor from the Fantômas series) and the woman journalist (as depicted in Marcelle Tinayre’s La Rebelle (), Camille Pert’s Leur égale (), the Margueritte brothers’ Femmes nouvelles (), and Eugène Brieux’s play La Femme seule ()). Rees produces rich and detailed readings of all the texts she considers, unfolding their complexities with great subtlety while drawing in ideas from fields as diverse as phenomenology and remediation theory. A substantial and significant research content has been orchestrated with a sure touch, resulting in a monograph which will be of interest not only to dix-neuviémistes but to anyone concerned with the relationship between literature and journalism, and the latter’s role in shaping modern culture. K’ C L E B Mourning and Creativity in Proust. By A M E. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. . xx+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Anna Magdalena Elsner’s book provides a rich and fascinating account of the multifaceted quality of mourning in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It describes mourning as a never-ending process through which the complex dynamics of the relationship between the self and the other come to the fore, and considers Proust’s depiction of this process with regard to its aesthetic, social, and ethical dimensions. In Elsner’s view, Proust’s discourse of mourning evokes the ancient connection between melancholia and creativity while at the same time urging us to reconsider this ancient topos by exposing the ethical implications of the creative responses triggered by loss (Elsner engages a quite broad definition of creativity, encompassing ‘all forms of activity, movement and expression that occur aer a period of emotional standstill’ (p. )). e ethical significance of Proust’s association of mourning and creativity is carefully teased out in the book through perceptive close readings of scenes of mourning from the novel; these are set in dialogue with philosophical voices such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Emmanuel Levinas. Derrida in particular becomes a fertile interlocutor for Elsner, not least because, as she convincingly claims, Proustian mourning ‘confirms and simultaneously adds to’ (p. ) the Derridean idea of deuil impossible—mourning as a necessarily impossible act intrinsically linked to our ethical responsibility for those we mourn. e cornerstone in the book’s theoretical framework is Sigmund Freud’s work on mourning, and while his foundational essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ () is given ample attention, the book profits greatly from the author’s willingness to engage with the entire range of Freud’s thoughts on mourning. roughout the book, a variety of texts are discussed that allow Elsner to identify a significant shi in Freud’s perspectives on mourning, according to which, crucially, his later work ‘no longer distinguishes between mourning and melancholia, and proposes MLR, .,   that mourning, like melancholia, might be an interminable process’ (p. ). is shi contributes to making Freud so central to the book’s reading of Proust, since Proustian mourning too, Elsner argues, is characterized by interminability. is is illustrated by the two main examples of the study (the narrator’s mourning over his grandmother and Albertine), both of which depict mourning as ‘an interminable process forever trapped between anticipation and belatedness’ (p. ). While the ‘distorted time-structure of mourning’ (p. ) is the subject of Chapter , Chapter  excavates the novel’s ‘topography of mourning’ (p. ). Drawing on Freud’s de- finition of the uncanny as ‘deriving from a shiing and thereby fluid distinction between imagination and reality’ (p. ), Elsner persuasively argues that when the seemingly familiar spaces of Balbec, Venice, and Paris are re-experienced in the wake of loss, they turn into uncanny ‘spaces of mourning as the narrator’s inner grief slowly invades the exterior reality in which [mourning] is experienced’ (p. ). e section on Paris centres on the wartime passage of Le Temps retrouvé, in which Proust explores mourning as a public and collective experience. In Elsner’s shrewd analysis of this passage...

Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives ed. by Alexis Torrance and Symeon Paschalidis

Reviewed by: Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives ed. by Alexis Torrance and Symeon Paschalidis Ionuţ Biliuţă Alexis Torrance and Symeon Paschalidis, eds. Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. 202 pp. One of the key questions of theological modernity relates to the status of the person and its defining features, according to the conceptual framework of patristic and modern theology. Scholars such as Karl Barth, Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae, Nikos Nissiotis, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, and Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos have reinterpreted patristic ideas and engendered a new approach to the human person, connecting the ancient Byzantine views with the philosophical voices of modernity. Whether approaching the teachings of the fathers of the Church or appropriating the main streams of modern philosophical thought, these theologians have explored the mutations and permutations of the human person in contemporary thought. The present book, edited by two of the most promising and brilliant representatives of this new wave of theologians, readdresses the crucial question of the human in light of the longue durée enjoyed by this theological construct, from the early patristic thought up to the present day. It has a double intention: on the one hand to reconfigure the relation between tradition and modernity by placing the human person at the apex of theological reflection for over two thousand years and, on the other hand, to explore the origins of theological efforts to crystallize a compelling perception regarding the very nature of the human person. In this book, the editors bring together various reputed voices from the field of patristics (Paul Blowers, Johannes Zachhuber, Demetrios Harper, Jean-Claude Larchet) and systematic theology (Nikolaos Loudovikos, Nikolaos Asproulis) in their effort to connect the language of the fathers with that of contemporary theologians. From the very first pages, the editors emphasize that the aim of the book is to widen the debate about the genesis and contemporary conversation regarding the status of the human person: “Rather than dwell exclusively on terminological markers (such as the Greek words hypostasis and prosopon) and their meaning in the sources, such an approach needs to be combined with a broader and more widely focused enterprise, one that is not limited to dogmatic formulas and their conceptual content, but includes reflection on the human person arising from other sources, whether liturgical, hagiographic, iconographic, homiletic, ascetic, and so on” (1). Delivered at a conference held in Thessaloniki in May 2014, the papers in the volume are divided into four historical units. The first three (7–44), present the perceptions of the human person in the early Church and Byzantium. Christos Karakolis describes Paul’s views on the connection between personal relation and moral imitation, and Paul M. Blowers’ contribution focuses on the symbiosis between emotional “scripts” and personal moral identity in the thought of the Greek Fathers. Johannes Zachhuber discusses the perceptions regarding the [End Page 121] identity and nature of the human person in the anti-Chalcedonian writings of Severus of Antioch and John Philoponus. The most relevant contributions to the goal of the book set by the editors are those of Blowers and Zachhuber. Introducing the lively discussion about the tension between the innate or the acquired moral traits of each person from contemporary moral psychology and identity theory, Blowers shows how the early fathers (Irenaeus of Lyon, Origen, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, fourth-century Greek monastics, John Cassian and Maximus the Confessor, up to the Fathers of the Philokalia) anticipated these scientific debates in their reflections about the relationship between image and likeness in the realization of the moral self. On the other hand, when comparing the Cappadocian formula for the Trinity (one ousia but as three distinct hypostases) with the Severian solution, Zachhuber emphasizes that for the theological school emerging in the footsteps of Cyril of Alexandria, no hypostasis can exist without a physis (36). Although forgotten or merely disregarded in the Byzantine East, the miaphysite solution proposed by Severus as the “inversion” of the Cappadocian compromise was taken even further by John Philoponus, who argued that particular natures could not be universal, therefore paving the...

Introduction: Gestalt Therapy and “New Phenomenology”

Introduction: Gestalt Therapy and “New Phenomenology”

Aquinas and Solovyov: Unified Christian ontological-epistemology in critique of epistemic reductivism

Modern positivism reduced ‘being to knowing’, considering being as cognitively inaccessible and its study as meaningless. In recent ‘scientistic’ scholarship, these presuppositions have found new life. However, Christian ontologically founded epistemology is concerned by this dismissal of being. In search of an ecumenical response, this work attempts a multi-patrimonial Christian, philosophical counterargument to reductive anti-metaphysical epistemology. A comparative analysis between the ontological epistemologies of Saint Thomas Aquinas (as representative of the Mediaeval Occidental Christian tradition) and Vladimir Solovyov (a modern, eastern Christian philosopher-theologian) is made. In this contrast, it is argued that a harmonic Christian philosophical voice is evident. In both Western and Eastern approaches, the causal complexity of being – by the fact that being is – implores the philosopher for a unified account, in contradiction to anti-metaphysical reductivism in any of its forms. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Bringing the Christian metaphysics and epistemology of Aquinas and Solovyov into conversation, which the author has not seen done in other literature, this work brings together Epistemology and Metaphysics, leading to a unified practical application in the critique of issue within contemporary Philosophy of Science, scientism.

La voix du philosophe Laruelle

The Voice of Laruelle, the philosopher(Abstract)What is a voice in the context of the arts and philosophy? In the space of the philosopher's voice, in the complex grammar of his language is played his philosophical timbre, his own space, his particular voice, composed of concepts, articulated by the laws of coherence of the common philosophical language, with hypnotic specificities. These specificities are precisely the fruit of processes formerly called rhetoric, which I call non-hypnotics (of generalized hypnotic space), one of whose functions is just to speak in a double space: the common reference space of the reader or listener, and the conceptual virtual space peculiar to the philosopher. To the extent that the reader must pay increased and permanent attention to this double space, the philosophical trance effect, equivalent to the Ericksonian hypnotic trance, is facilitated. The difficulty of this double reading is the incessant passage from one code to another, which is also a hypnotic fascination. Heidegger prolongs and renews its structures and draws some effects from them, which provoke in the mind of the reader as an over-flow, a saturation effect, which itself favors the philosophical trance. Thus, each voice seeks to captivate the mind by confusing it with concepts, which seem at first sight familiar, but which reveal themselves with the use which is made, like formidable concepts to the power of unaccustomed fascination. One of the pleasures of reading Lareuelle's philosophy is due to this type of fascination with the philosophical voice and its language.

The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker

Reviewed by: The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker Leah Miranda Hughes Alan Michael Parker. The Ladder. Tupelo Press, 2016. Some literary voices hit a tone that can be identified by only a few words, like playing “Name That Tune” with just a few lines, and Alan Michael Parker projects one of those voices. From his distinctive gang of Vandals to sundry romances to verbal calculations, the poet manages a smart and frank philosophical voice throughout eight collections of poems. The Ladder, named the best book of 2016 in North Carolina with the NC Poetry Society’s notable Brock-Campbell Award, sounds as true to Parker as ever from the first note. The Ladder begins with the perfect epigraph, lines from Puccini’s poet Rudolfo in La Boheme: “What do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live.” A reader might view Parker’s collection with the opera in mind: a poor but happy, artistic life, the poet’s lover romantically dying in his arms, proving that art and love fill living with value. Parker begins the collection gathering the leaves of “this life the next life,” settling in to “Give a Little Talk on Singing.” This poem reveals a narrative philosophy that Parker and Puccini’s Rudolfo obviously share, for the poet, to write is to live. Illustrative of the struggle inherent in living (not to mention creating art), Parker’s narrator sings only begrudgingly. With a dry, discontented humor, the poems scan the horizon from offering prayers for daily living to making demands of God. What is enough? What to remember? What wishes to make? The collection gestures towards a potential reset at a midpoint as opposed to a midlife crisis. In the middle years of his life, the narrator of the title poem gets a grass sack “to start [a] new life.” Parker would use the ladder contained in his grass sack to “climb down from ambition.” Does the reader suppose that the speaker indicates a realization or expectation: To not expect so much? To descend from some height reached? To negotiate the expected anticlimax of a plot diagram in any given narrative? The Old Testament tells the story of Jacob’s Ladder: as Jacob flees for his life, his murderous brother Esau close on his heels, he dreams of a ladder that angels ascend and descend with God standing alongside. It is the gate to heaven. An old spiritual memorializes the story, one still sung as a hymn in the South today to remind the choir and congregation that “we are climbing…higher higher” everyday. In fact, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie further popularized the song in folk music, bringing the Old Testament tale to a celebration of the steady daily human struggle of living in this world. [End Page 50] Through hair, X-rays, the moon, hotel rooms, and postcards, Alan Michael Parker also celebrates a person’s daily wrestling with life. With a keen eye on some inevitable end, the poems convey a sense of hope and home from the self-professed curmudgeonly singer. Parker brings clever diction and even more witty parallels, observations, and speculations to pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary. In each volume, Parker has an emotive house pet representing domestic love. In this collection, the dog misses “you,” an infamous use of second person, so much that he learns regretful, wistful, simple and sincere phrases in a multitude of foreign languages. These dogs and cats often extend gracious compassion, fetching the reader a heartbreaking moonful of amour or affection. Alan Michael Parker’s collection The Ladder keeps alive his distinctive voice over time. The poems convey honest statements with humor, yet, deepen in sincerity, with pretense or bluff stripped away for the reader to sit at the center of experiences such as burying a relative, going through the airport, taking a swim, turning 50. To illustrate, one of Parker’s speakers would steal a work of art, a Matisse representing hope, but not burn it to cover up the crime. Another speaker will ponder the eternal to come at peace with the ephemeral nature of a full head of hair. Such vulnerable honesty creates heartbreakingly beautiful poems...

Introduction: 100 Years Completed!

With this issue, we bring to a close our year-long celebration of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. It is a significant achievement for a journal to reach 100 years of publication (even if under different names). And we are delighted to know that the journal is just as strong today as it has ever been.As our regular readers know, we have celebrated this 100th volume by re-publishing historically important essays from past issues—followed by new responses to those articles that put them in historical context and delineate the continuing significance of their ideas and arguments. We labelled these collections of pieces ReSoundings.In this last issue for the year, we focus ReSoundings in the area of ethics—certainly fitting given the connection between the journal and the Society for Values in Higher Education (SVHE). And the articles we are republishing could not be any more important. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is one of the most important books in moral theory written in the twentieth century—its impact moving beyond the academy and into public policy and political discourse (often in concealed, but powerful ways). In the spring 1984 issue of Soundings, we published a review of MacIntyre's book written by Richard J. Bernstein, who (like MacIntyre) is a powerful philosophical voice and a prolific writer. The Bernstein review (one of the most widely circulated reviews of MacIntyre's book) was followed by a rejoinder from MacIntyre. To have these two philosophical giants battle it out in the pages of Soundings was a real treat. We re-print both essays here in this issue.Revisiting that debate in this issue reveals the continuing relevance of the moral issues, problems, and arguments with which they engaged. We have two respondents whose work will help us further understand the debate. David Hoekema of Calvin College, former president of SVHE and current chair of the Editorial Board of Soundings, and Allen Dunn of the University of Tennessee, former editor of Soundings and current president of SVHE, each provide compelling insights about the debate and its continuing relevance.The ReSoundings section is followed by other contemporary work focused on issues in ethics. First, is an important piece by Luciana Lolich and Kathleen Lynch of University College Dublin. Their work on the ethics of palliative care gets to some central issues that must be considered in thinking about human autonomy, choice, and cultural values. Then, we feature two reviews on recent books in ethics: Stephen Bloch-Schulman of Elon University's review of Elizabeth Minnich's The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking, and Thomas D. Kennedy of Berry College's response to Michael Banner's The Ethics of Everyday Life.We hope you enjoy this last issue of our celebratory 100th year. And many thanks to all of our readers who provided such positive feedback on our ReSoundings initiative this year.Happy reading!

Excursus on Wittgenstein's Rule-Following Considerations

In this essay, I seek to demonstrate the interplay of philosophical voices – particularly, that of a platonist voice and a community-agreement-view voice – that drives Wittgenstein’s rule-following dialectic forward; and I argue that each voice succumbs to a particular form of dialectical oscillation that renders its response to the problem of rule-following philosophically inadequate. Finally, I suggest that, by seeing and taking stock of the dilemma in which these responses to the skeptical problem are caught, we can come to appreciate Wittgenstein’s own view of what might constitute a proper a response to the so-called problem of rule-following. This view can be preliminarily characterized by saying that Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissolve the temptation to philosophically rebut the skeptical challenge posed by the rule-following dialectic, an aim he achieves by revealing the semantic emptiness of the apparent sentences that raise the skeptical problem.

Why Organ Conscription Should Be off the Table: Extrapolation from Heidegger’s Being and Time

The question, what measures to address the shortage of transplantable organs are ethically permissible? requires careful attention because, apart from its impact on medical practice, the stance we espouse here reflects our interpretations of human freedom and mortality. To raise the number of available organs, on utilitarian grounds, bioethicists and medical professionals increasingly support mandatory procurement. This view is at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2003, p. 2296), according to which ‘[o]rgan donation after death is a noble and meritorious act’ but ethically impermissible absent consent. Those who concur with this position, but would oppose conscription on independent philosophical grounds, have not yet found a voice in the Western tradition comparable in strength to the utilitarian basis of the policy’s support, for Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, too, lend themselves to a requirement that we make our organs available to others when they can no longer serve ourselves. One finds an ethical wedge against conscription in an unexpected philosophical locale: the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where pertinent individual choices arc protectively over what happens post mortem. Heidegger’s perspective on this issue thus meshes, not with other philosophical voices, but with Catholic doctrine—a surprising convergence of atheistic and theistic approaches to our flourishing whose ground I address in the article’s conclusion.

"Any Search for an Origin is Hysterical": Summoning the Ghost of J.L. Austin

As the father of the concept of the “performative utterance”, British philosopher of language J.L. Austin is regularly cast as the point of origin in a genealogy tracing the influence of linguistic theory on performance theory. Based on extensive research into Austin’s writing praxis, this paper demonstrates that the philosopher produced and disseminated his research orally, dialogically, and pedagogically through contexts that privileged the inter-subjective exchange. It frames Austin’s self-described practice of “linguistic phenomenology” as a pragmatic one in which philosophy is context. I demonstrate that this mode of “doing” or “performing” philosophy is also at play within the dramaturgy of Austin’s texts, which restage his thought processes and invite his readers to become spectators to the dramatization of his ideas. My analysis offers up a portrait of a J.L. Austin who enacted his philosophy about the performative utterance in a performative manner. In so doing, it exposes the inaugural texts about performativity as hybrid objects that trouble the concepts of “authorship” and “origin”. It also shows that these texts are infected, at their inception, by parasites, by literature, by the Other, and by the ghosts that Austin tried so hard to exorcise, yet that—on some level of consciousness—he simultaneously allowed to haunt his philosophical voice.

Feminists and their perspectives on the church fathers' beliefs regarding women: An inquiry

The church fathers and their views on women were influenced substantially and significantly by philosophical voices, such as that of Aristotle and Plato, amongst others. A brief account on Aristotle�s and Plato�s ideas about women, from feminist perspectives, will be touched upon. The article furthermore explores feminist voices, regarding the church fathers� thinking about women, and how these views contributed to women�s subordination and domination. The research will focus on the many varied views on women held by Latin church fathers, such as Tertullian (c. 155�255), Cyprian (c. 200�258 AD), Jerome (c. 347�419), Ambrose (c. 339�397) and Augustine (354�430), and the Greek church fathers, such as Clement of Alexander (c. 150�215), Origen (c. 185�254) and Chrysostom (c. 347�407), from the perspective of feminists. It will be contended that an insensitive and too early denunciation of the early church fathers as misogynists often occurs in women�s history without taking into consideration the church fathers� philosophical and social contexts and, hence, the opinions that formed their views. One such theory that helped to shape the church fathers� views about women is the classic medical theory, and this therefore merits a brief discussion. Another important point one has to take into account is the church fathers� perceptions of the carnal (sexual) and the spiritual world that shaped their views about women.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: History teaches us what people before us did, what their intentions were and where they failed or went wrong. If historical viewpoints about women reflect women�s subordination and oppression, they force women to discover their roots and their past. The church fathers, however, inherited a long tradition of debates, beliefs, and arguments regarding women�s moral, intellectual, and natural capacities. Therefore, generalised, simplified, and unsympathetic views about the ancient philosophers and the church fathers� views on women often leads to the ineffective understanding of these men and their context.

Derwent: Revisiting Melville’s Clarel

Derwent may have more speaking lines and appearances than any other character in Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876); in dramatic terms, he emerges as a major philosophical voice embracing and synthesizing the optimistic Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Derwent brings to Clarel a persistent hope that lasts throughout Melville’s conception of the otherwise largely despairing poem.