Preeminent Place Research Articles

Archbishop Wulfstan of York and the Danish Conquest of 1016

Abstract Wulfstan, archbishop of York (1002–1023) and bishop of Worcester (1002–1016), occupies a pre-eminent place in the political history of eleventh-century England, yet surprisingly little is known of his life and career. The consequences of this ignorance are particularly acute for the years surrounding the Danish Conquest of 1016. The upheavals of this period led Wulfstan to compose his most well-known homily, the Sermo lupi ad Anglos (1014), resign from the see of Worcester (1016), and transfer his loyalty from the English king Æthelred to the Danish conqueror Cnut. Yet while the years 1013 to 1018 left discernible traces in Wulfstan’s thought, the particular circumstances that produced these traces can be perceived only dimly. The means by which Wulfstan maintained his status through the years of conquest are significant for more than just their impact on his career and evolving political vision. While his role as a leading legislator during the reigns of both Æthelred and Cnut has been taken as evidence that he managed to emerge from the Conquest relatively unscathed, Wulfstan’s influence at the royal court during these years was inconsistent at best and his success in navigating the change in power was not inevitable. Wulfstan’s approach to the complicated politics of the Conquest thus provides a useful case-study of the various ways in which the Church, its leaders as much as its institutions, balanced competing allegiances to king and conqueror.

Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets de Jean-Georges Noverre : un plaidoyer pour la « recherche-création » au XVIIIe siècle ?

In Les Lettres sur la danse, first published in 1760, then in 1803–1804, and again in 1807, Jean-Georges Noverre developed four complementary aspects that could be said to inscribe this choreographer's approach within the dynamics of research-creation as they are known and debated today. First, Noverre undertakes a reflexive return to his long practice as a dancer, choreographer, and pedagogue. Redefining dance, Noverre then asserts its place among the other arts (which it struggles to impress) and thereby develops an original argument. Les Lettres subsequently deliver reflections on the act of creation itself, in which Noverre asserts the preeminent place of knowledge. Finally, Les Lettres attest to the desire for sharing and reciprocity that underscore the epistolary format itself.

Honestas and the Angevin Queen: Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Letters and Their Classical Rhetorical Antecedents

Abstract In 1193, King Richard I of England was taken captive by the Holy Roman emperor Henry VI. In several letters, the captive Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, exhorted Pope Celestine III to intercede on her son’s behalf. The specific topics on which she drew were ancient concepts within the topic of honestas, or virtue, and, more specifically, justice as one of the virtues. Justice occupied a preeminent place among the other virtues in medieval thought, and topics related to justice, as a species of honestas, were traditionally regarded as proper for deliberative argumentation. Eleanor’s letters set forth an argumentative schema regarding the nature of justice, asserting that it possesses an anatomy of subordinate parts that include friendship, pity, and the body politic of the kingdom. Her appeals illustrate the significance of ancient virtue theory in medieval political persuasion as an inheritance of Ciceronian thought, the place of virtue in geopolitical civic persuasion in her day, and how women implemented and conceived of social justice from classical rhetorical sources and employed them for civic ends.

Review: Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop, by Catherine Zabinski

Review: <i>Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop</i>, by Catherine Zabinski

The German Idea of Democracy

The German Idea of Democracy Gangolf Hübinger (bio) Robert E. Norton, The Crucible of German Democracy. Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2021), XV + 649pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-159828-9. €129.00. The theologian, philosopher, and politician Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) belonged, like Max Weber, to the classical thinkers of the modern age. Weber and Troeltsch were friends and rivals. For a time they lived in Heidelberg in the same house on Ziegelhäuser Landstraße. Their main works, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, are regularly compared.1 Politically, both were committed to liberal reforms to the German Empire, to a Verständigungsfrieden with the Entente powers, and to the introduction of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic. To this end, both scholars acted as prominent campaigners for the German Democratic Party (DDP).2 Far more research has been done on Max Weber's political profile than on Ernst Troeltsch's. It is therefore extremely welcome that Robert E. Norton has now penned a very detailed and thoroughly researched study on Ernst Troeltsch's understanding of democracy and his political activities during the First World War. Norton, a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Notre Dame, has written a widely [End Page 125] acclaimed biography of Stefan George.3 In his latest study of World War I, he evaluates an impressive array of contemporary writings, speeches, and manifestos in order to situate and highlight Troeltsch in the fierce controversies among German scholars and intellectuals over wartime goals and reforms of the political system. In many respects, he was able to draw on the Kritische Ernst Troeltsch Gesamtausgabe.4 Norton has not written a biography of the entire life span of the liberal theologian and philosopher of history as such. His intellectual biography is contextual and is guided by two theses. Modern German democracy emerged in the internal battles of ideas during the First World War, before the American President Woodrow Wilson exerted external pressure with his wartime goal 'to make the world safe for democracy'. And democracy in Germany was certainly not a result of the defeat in the war. Rather, there had been a 'process of social transformation' early after the beginning of the war, pushed by scholars such as Hugo Preuß, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze. Ernst Troeltsch occupied 'a preeminent place among them, in these wartimes debates'. Troeltsch, as an opinion leader of German 'self liberation' (11), requires an historical re-evaluation. Troeltsch's permanent struggle for 'the necessity of a democratic future for Germany' has been unjustly forgotten in German historical culture. With his monograph, Norton does not want to celebrate his protagonist as a 'hero', although he certainly was one in the sense of Dieter Thomä's book Why Democracies Need Heroes.5 Norton's Crucible of German Democracy comes at the right time. For some time now, there has been a fierce dispute in Germany about the opportunities and threats to democracy in the past and present. Is democracy, as the Western type of political rule, in a deep existential crisis today, and how, by comparison, did contemporaries in the World War and the Weimar Republic view and judge the crises of Germany's revolutionary reordering? Norton wants to set his own accent here and has chosen Ernst Troeltsch as a key figure for this purpose. In the obituaries in 1923, Troeltsch was compared to Albert Einstein, and Norton adopts the image of the 'Einstein of culture' for his introduction, bringing Troeltsch into new focus as the leading figure in German intellectual history. Norton is full of admiration for [End Page 126] Troeltsch's style of thinking: 'his almost alchemical talent for integrating vast and disparate amounts of information within a generous framework of dazzling subtlety and sophistication' (24f.). Troeltsch earned this reputation with his two major works, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches and the unfinished work Historicism and its Problems, but also through his more than 1,300 items of literary criticisms and reviews in the entire field of cultural studies.6 Troeltsch was able to transfer his authority as...

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland

Reviewed by: Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland Shea McCollough Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xv + 432 pp. More than three decades have passed since Rita Copeland first published Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1991), a study that has become an indispensable resource for scholars thinking about the development of vernacular texts and interpretative models from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. That first book laid the foundation for a body of scholarly work from Copeland that, while dealing with the variously related topics of classical reception, pedagogy, and representation, is nonetheless bound together by the through-line of rhetoric, her most persistent and pervasive research interest. Her newest book, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, is a delightful expression of that rhetorical preoccupation, demonstrating a sustained interest in the intertwined relationships between rhetoric, emotion, and ethics that developed and redeveloped from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages and offering a compelling and comprehensive narrative of the transformations of rhetorical thought and practice over nearly two millennia. Like the good rhetorician that she is, Copeland offers a map of the book's overarching scope in apophatic terms, outlining the contours of the study by simultaneously delineating what it is not: it does not endeavor to offer a comprehensive history of medieval emotions—à la Barbara Rosenwein's Generations of Feeling (2015), or any number of similar studies that Copeland mentions throughout her footnotes—nor is it an attempt to uncover and represent the emotional experiences of medieval readers per se, although readerly experience becomes a secondary interest in the book, particularly in chapter 2. Rather, what Copeland does embark upon is a twofold history of both rhetoric through emotion and emotion through rhetoric in the Middle Ages, a history predicated upon [End Page 240] a belief that rhetoric "represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions" and that is ultimately "concerned more with production than with consumption of emotive content" (1). Copeland builds from these initial claims, describing the "double plot" of her book "as a reception history that commences with the Ciceronian rhetorics of antiquity, that develops on a long course, and that, at a later juncture, incorporates the Aristotelian perspective" (14). Following this robust outline, the rest of the text splits into two halves, emblematized by the figures of Cicero and Aristotle, respectively. Chapter 1 analyzes Cicero's theory of affectio as presented in De inventione, establishing emotion as a valid form of invention (the process of developing an argument), as opposed to an exclusive element of style, even though the stylistic understanding would eventually come to dominate the discourse of medieval rhetoric. Chapter 2 picks up on this thread and demonstrates how early Christian thinkers, primarily Augustine and Cassiodorus, expanded their understanding of style to accommodate an ethical dimension of rhetorical appeal invested in the cultivation of "textual affection" (59), whether for the scriptures or for Virgil. As this instilled love for texts grew commonplace, it became less imperative to explicitly outline the ethical valence of style in rhetorical texts, resulting in the paradoxical effacement of this notion from Christianized rhetorical treatises by the twelfth century. Chapter 3 narrates the rise of style to a place of preeminence in the "pragmatic rhetoric" of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries by close reading pedagogical treatises (112), love letters, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, Petrarch's Seniles, and Chaucer's (again) Clerk's Prologue. Chapter 4 (re)turns to Aristotle's Rhetoric, the second piece of the book's "double plot," in order to "chart the routes through which Aristotelian rhetoric found its place in later medieval thought" (158). Copeland sketches the transmission history of the Rhetoric, arguing that the text effectively disappeared until resuscitated by a group of Arabic scholars—Al-Farabi (ca. 870–950), Avicenna (980–1037), and Averroes (1126–98)—whose commentaries treated the emotions "as both cognitive and moral forces in persuasion" (175). Chapter 5 extends the discussion of the Rhetoric's medieval afterlife by focusing on a shift in thinking about the emotions evident in Giles of Rome...

Assessing the triple helix model for research and development in sub-Saharan Africa

The triple helix model refers to when universities, industry, and government work together to foster economic and social development (Leydesdorff, 2012; Galvao et al., 2019). The concept was first theorised in the 1990s by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leidesdorff to underscore the relationship between universities, governments, and industry using universities' research innovations to propel economic development (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). Expanding on the triple helix model, Elias Carayannis, and David Campbell in 2009 added a fourth dimension by highlighting the role of the media and civil society within the framework (Carayannis and Campbell, 2009). Increasingly, the accurate dissemination of scientific innovations derived from university-industry-government collaboration has given the model a pre-eminent place in institutional empyrean (Etzkowitz, 2003).

Da semântica formal à pragmática transcendental: a ideia original de Karl-Otto Apel

Karl-Otto Apel ocupa um lugar de destaque entre os filósofos alemães da primeira geração após a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Sua realização pioneira, que é ofuscada pela disputa acirrada sobre o problema de uma “fundamentação última” da ética, consiste em abrir uma nova dimensão na análise da linguagem e, com isso, completar a “virada linguística”. Ele realizou a transição da semântica formal, que se concentra na estrutura dos enunciados, para a pragmática “transcendental” da linguagem, centrada nas propriedades formais do uso e da interpretação das expressões linguísticas. Desta forma, ele também lançou as bases para uma ética do discurso. O ensaio traça as etapas dessa “transformação da filosofia transcendental”, que, partindo do Heidegger tardio, conduzem à hermenêutica transcendental inspirada por Peirce. Ao dar continuidade a uma discussão que transcorreu ao longo de toda a vida com meu amigo Karl-Otto, enfrento, no final, alguns problemas que, a meu ver, surgem dessa fundamentação da ética do discurso.

The Sine Qua Non of Carl Schmitt’s political thinking: The issue of interstate relations

This article demonstrates the pre-eminent place the issue of interstate relations occupies in Carl Schmitt’s political thinking between the early 1920s and early 1940s. First, I discuss how Schmitt’s understanding of interstate relations develops from 1923 until the Nazi’s taking power. By focusing on his critique of imperialism and universalism in international law during this period, I reveal that his engagement with the Monroe Doctrine, the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Kellogg–Briand Pact results in a change in his views in Roman Catholicism and Political Form in which he talks about the possibility of a world state in the form of a League of Nations with supra-state and supra-sovereignty powers. Second, I show to what extent the novel international circumstances created by the emergence of the Nazi rule leads him to elaborate the concepts of the Reich and the Groβraum in addition to his continuing engagement with the concepts of imperialism and universalism. By accentuating the development of his interest in the concepts of imperialism, universalism, the Reich and the Groβraum, I argue that the question of interstate relations is the sine qua non of Schmitt’s political thinking. I conclude by asserting that studying Schmitt’s political thinking in its connection with his interest in interstate relations provides a promising path for leftist political theorists to understand, explain and reimagine the contemporary global order.

Nuevos espacios, viejas agendas: la construcción temática de los procesos electorales de Portugal y Brasil en Twitter

ABSTRACT The opening of new communication spaces—in the form of social media—derivada from the irruption of applied technologies, allows political parties and candidates to establish their own dynamics for the construction of the agenda. The present work, with an Iberoamerican dimension, analyzes eight Twitter accounts of the main candidates in Brazil and Portugal (Jair Bolsonaro, Fernando Haddad, Ciro Gomes, Geraldo Alckmin, Antonio Costa, Rui Rio, Catarina Martins and Assunção Cristas) during the two months prior to the 2018 and 2019 elections. The main objective is to determine the degree of relationship between the digital agendas of the candidates of both States; the second objective is to compare the online and offline agendas of the Latin American nation. Methodologically, a data extraction process has been carried out, assisted by the Python Twint library, a manual content analysis of the tweets through a prior categorization by the Nvivo software application, and a bivariate correlation in SPSS. In the results obtained, the old agenda issues (both chronic and intermittent) continue to occupy a preeminent place also on Twitter, with an indicative differentiation of the off-line and on-line scope, but which is not enough to incorporate new post-material character issues. No great correlations are found between the candidates, considering that the ideology in the interstate field determines the highest levels of coincidence. Likewise, the coalition of agendas model evidenced in previous investigations is discussed.

Rethinking 2 Samuel 12:15–23: A Case against “The Death Positivity Bias” Phenomenon in Africa

A penchant for the dead occupies a preeminent place in the belief systems of Africans. Though the phenomenon seems to be a worldwide challenge to the equilibrium of societies, the situation in Africa has become more critical, probably due to the general belief that the dead still have the potential to harm the living when the latter mishandle them. As a result of this, an inordinate attention has been given to the dead, through exorbitant funeral rites, at the expense of the living. In the attempt to change the status quo, this study has examined King David’s attitude in 2 Sam 12:15–23 and ascertained that his behavior towards the sickness and ensuing death of his son is antagonistic to the prevailing phenomenon of “the Death Positivity Bias.” Through a phenomenological approach to the passage under study, I argue that David’s attitude before and after the child’s demise must be the way forward. The focus must be on the living, especially those in dire straits. The study concludes, therefore, that David’s posture stands as a clear case against “the Death Positivity Bias” phenomenon in Africa.

From formal semantics to transcendental pragmatics: Karl-Otto Apel’s original insight

Karl-Otto Apel occupies a pre-eminent place among the German philosophers of the first post-war generation. His groundbreaking achievement, which has been unjustly overshadowed by the tenacious debate over the ‘ultimate justification’ of ethics, consisted in disclosing a new dimension in the philosophy of language and thereby completing the ‘linguistic turn’. He made the transition from formal semantics, which concentrates on the structure of propositions, to ‘transcendental’ pragmatics of language, which focuses on the formal aspects of the use and interpretation of linguistic expressions. In pursuing this path, he also laid the foundations for discourse ethics. The essay traces the stages of this ‘transformation of transcendental philosophy’ leading from the late Heidegger to Apel’s conception of ‘transcendental hermeneutics’ inspired by Peirce. Continuing the lifelong discourse with my friend Karl-Otto, I will conclude by addressing some problems raised by his justification of discourse ethics.

Romantic Wales and the Imperial Picturesque

AbstractThis essay argues that the aesthetic category named the picturesque was first systematized in a Welsh colonial context and that picturesque looking always reflects, to some degree, its initially imperialist function. While the picturesque rapidly acceded to a preeminent place in British travel and landscape writing, its rise was contested by Welsh and working-class writers like the antiquarian poet Richard Llwyd (1752–1835). By conspicuously failing to impose picturesque features on a carefully historicized landscape, Llwyd’s poem Beaumaris Bay (1800) lays bare the picturesque’s antihistorical drive to eradicate local difference. Renewed critical attention to early attempts to establish an antipicturesque aesthetic may uncover important precursors to present-day postcolonial and transnational theory, precursors that can enrich the ongoing global turn in literary history.

The Nature of Suffering, Health Care "Providers," and the Opioid Crisis.

Over the past 40 years, American medicine has become corporatized. Medical care has become permeated by a business philosophy whose primary concern is increasing shareholder value rather than providing optimal care for patients. Patient-physician relationships have eroded as the health care system has turned its attention toward electronic medical records (rather than face-to-face interactions with patients), toward quantifiable ("billable") metrics, and toward calculating the relative value units delivered by various health care "providers." An emphasis on clinical efficiency has diminished the depth of patient-physician contacts and has tended to promote quick, superficial interactions. Patients in pain are often overmedicated rather than listened to and understood. Suffering (which is at bottom a problem about the meaning of illness) has lost its place as a major medical concern. It is often easier to write a prescription for a powerful narcotic than to probe the details of a patient's life. This unfortunate tendency to seek quick, pill-based solutions to pain has been reinforced by the pharmaceutical industry, which has promoted this simple but profitable approach through the aggressive marketing of oxycodone and related medications. Both patients and physicians have lost out in the process. We need to reconstruct a health care system that gives pain its due but places that pain in the larger context of a patient's suffering. This can only be done by restoring clinicians to their preeminent place in medicine. We must strive to be healers, not simply providers.

Using Augmented and Virtual Reality in Information Literacy Instruction to Reduce Library Anxiety in Nontraditional and International Students

Throughout its early years, the Oral Roberts University (ORU) Library held a place of pre-eminence on campus. ORU’s founder envisioned the Library as central to all academic function and scholarship. Under the direction of the founding dean of learning resources, the Library was an early pioneer in innovative technologies and methods. However, over time, as the case with many academic libraries, the Library’s reputation as an institution crucial to the academic work on campus had diminished.&#x0D; A team of librarians is now engaged in programs aimed at repositioning the Library as the university’s hub of learning. Toward that goal, the Library has long taught information literacy (IL) to students and faculty through several traditional methods, including one-shot workshops and sessions tied to specific courses of study. Now, in conjunction with disseminating augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AVMR) learning technologies, the Library is redesigning instruction to align with various realities of higher education today, including uses of AVMR in instruction and research and following best practices from research into serving&#x0D; &#x0D; online learners;&#x0D; international learners not accustomed to Western higher-education practices; and&#x0D; learners returning to university study after being away from higher education for some time or having changed disciplines of study.&#x0D; &#x0D; The Library is innovating online tutorials targeted for nontraditional and international graduate students with various combinations of AVMR, with the goal to diminish library anxiety. Numerous library and information science studies have shown a correlation between library anxiety and reduced library use, and library use has been linked to student learning, academic success, and retention.[1]&#x0D; This paper focuses on IL instruction methods under development by the Library. Current indicators are encouraging as the Library embarks on the redesign of IL instruction and early development of inclusion of AVMR in IL instruction for nontraditional and international students.

To study the effect of different growth regulators at various concentration on fruit drop control in mango cv. Lagra

Mango (Mangifera indica L.) is the most important among the tropical fruits of India. It is the premier and choice fruit of India and undoubtedly is one of the best fruits of the world. Mango occupies a pre-eminent place amongst the fruit crops grown in India and is acknowledged as the king of the fruit of the country. The Langra, also known as Banarasi Langra, is a mango cultivar primarily grown in Banaras, Northern India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. This cultivar retains a greenish tinge while ripening. It is normally harvested during the last half of July. Around 2006, it was known to be gaining popularity on the international market. It is considered suitable for slicing and canning. Fruit drop is the serious problem of central and north India. There is a lot of problematic factor for fruit drop like low stigmatic receptivity, defective perfect flowers (having defective embryo sac development at anthesis), poor pollen transference, occurrence and extent of self-incompatibility, competition between developing fruitlets and drought or lack of irrigation and incidence of insect pest and diseases. NAA is a plant growth regulator. The effect of growth regulator i.e. naphthalene acetic acid (NAA) on fruit drop, yield and quality in mango, cultivar 'Langra' was studied. Full grown mango plants were sprayed with 10, 20, 30 and 40 ppm NAA at different stages of fruit development. It shows the positive response to all yield attribute. 2,4-D is a also plant growth regulator and also applied in 5, 10, 15 and 20 ppm.3rd plant growth is taken GA3 with 50, 100, 150 and 200 ppm. And the result shows that the NAA is most suitable for yield attribution.

Read. Ruminate. Repeat

Read. Ruminate. Repeat Lisa Disch (bio) SLOW PHILOSOPHY: READING AGAINST THE INSTITUTION BY MICHELLE BOULOUS WALKER London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. —Walt Whitman,Song of Myself, #24 At Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2013, the performance artist Taylor Mac read the quoted passage from Walt Whitman. “That bears repeating,” I recall Mac saying, and, after a short pause, read it again: “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Whitman, read slowly by Mac, brought about a transformation of democracy. It went from voting or speaking or protesting in public to practicing a universality of everyday life that Whitman carefully particularized. Not that all must have the same rights and benefits as I do but, rather, that I will refuse to enjoy or exercise in my way whatever is forbidden to all to enjoy or exercise in ways of their own. The performance left me pondering Whitman’s words and reflecting on the ruminative reading that made me hear and hold them in my mind. More than recite Whitman, Mac staged an encounter with Whitman’s words that set me—and, I am sure, others in the audience that night—reconsidering what democracy means to me and what it demands of me. [End Page 163] This is “slow reading,” the unrushed reading and rereading that “encourages us to take our time, to pause, to look up from the page” and trains us to “encounter complexity in . . . meaningful and creative ways” (Walker, 29, 11). Slow reading is “meditative; a careful and concerned practice that patiently connects us both with what we read and with how we live” (30). It is “open-ended” (29). And it “has ethics at its core—ethics here denoting an openness to the other” (29). Slow reading is the subject and, at its many engaging moments, the practice of Michelle Boulous Walker’s eloquent, thoughtful book, Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution. Walker explores various philosophic accounts of this practice as part of a twofold project: first, for the love of wisdom to “retrieve its pre-eminent place in philosophical work,” and, second, for an ethical reading practice to “counter the effects of containment and mastery that the institutional practice of philosophy has become” (2). Her narrative of the love of wisdom (lost with Socrates) may be too Heideggerian and her account of institutionalized philosophy (neurotically driven to grasp and contain the world “through the force of conceptual or logical argument”) a touch caricatured for some readers (58). But this need not diminish the experiential force and intuitive appeal of her guiding premise, that, to do justice to thinking in the current institutional climate of the academy, we scholars need to slow our reading down. Who among us does not feel that the “superficial skimming techniques developed online” are impairing our capacity to dwell patiently with complex texts that promise a new way of apprehending the apparently familiar (13)? What about the hazards of “professional reading,” the tactics we academics contrive to strike a compromise between fairness and expediency as we make our way through the stacks of files—promotion and tenure, graduate admissions, postdoctoral competitions, scholarly awards—that make an urgent claim on our judgment (33)? Professional reading forecloses “a meandering, an un-hurried reception, a reflection, a rumination, a meditative relation, a patience, a receptive attitude” to leave us “reading so as to produce immediate (and often hasty) judgments” (33). Or, think back to the last time you had a deeply moving encounter with a text only to suffer the peculiarly scholarly alienation that occurs when transformative reading experience meets the discursive joust of the typical graduate seminar. [End Page 164] Each of the book’s six chapters plumbs a different strategy for resisting “the instituted structure of philosophy’s desire to know” (56). There is “reading essayistically,” a “slow, open-ended rumination that takes its time and returns, time and time again, to the matter at hand,” that is inspired by Theodor Adorno...

Read. Ruminate. Repeat.

Read. Ruminate. Repeat Lisa Disch (bio) SLOW PHILOSOPHY: READING AGAINST THE INSTITUTION BY MICHELLE BOULOUS WALKER London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. —Walt Whitman,Song of Myself, #24 At Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2013, the performance artist Taylor Mac read the quoted passage from Walt Whitman. “That bears repeating,” I recall Mac saying, and, after a short pause, read it again: “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Whitman, read slowly by Mac, brought about a transformation of democracy. It went from voting or speaking or protesting in public to practicing a universality of everyday life that Whitman carefully particularized. Not that all must have the same rights and benefits as I do but, rather, that I will refuse to enjoy or exercise in my way whatever is forbidden to all to enjoy or exercise in ways of their own. The performance left me pondering Whitman’s words and reflecting on the ruminative reading that made me hear and hold them in my mind. More than recite Whitman, Mac staged an encounter with Whitman’s words that set me—and, I am sure, others in the audience that night—reconsidering what democracy means to me and what it demands of me. [End Page 163] This is “slow reading,” the unrushed reading and rereading that “encourages us to take our time, to pause, to look up from the page” and trains us to “encounter complexity in . . . meaningful and creative ways” (Walker, 29, 11). Slow reading is “meditative; a careful and concerned practice that patiently connects us both with what we read and with how we live” (30). It is “open-ended” (29). And it “has ethics at its core—ethics here denoting an openness to the other” (29). Slow reading is the subject and, at its many engaging moments, the practice of Michelle Boulous Walker’s eloquent, thoughtful book, Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution. Walker explores various philosophic accounts of this practice as part of a twofold project: first, for the love of wisdom to “retrieve its pre-eminent place in philosophical work,” and, second, for an ethical reading practice to “counter the effects of containment and mastery that the institutional practice of philosophy has become” (2). Her narrative of the love of wisdom (lost with Socrates) may be too Heideggerian and her account of institutionalized philosophy (neurotically driven to grasp and contain the world “through the force of conceptual or logical argument”) a touch caricatured for some readers (58). But this need not diminish the experiential force and intuitive appeal of her guiding premise, that, to do justice to thinking in the current institutional climate of the academy, we scholars need to slow our reading down. Who among us does not feel that the “superficial skimming techniques developed online” are impairing our capacity to dwell patiently with complex texts that promise a new way of apprehending the apparently familiar (13)? What about the hazards of “professional reading,” the tactics we academics contrive to strike a compromise between fairness and expediency as we make our way through the stacks of files—promotion and tenure, graduate admissions, postdoctoral competitions, scholarly awards—that make an urgent claim on our judgment (33)? Professional reading forecloses “a meandering, an un-hurried reception, a reflection, a rumination, a meditative relation, a patience, a receptive attitude” to leave us “reading so as to produce immediate (and often hasty) judgments” (33). Or, think back to the last time you had a deeply moving encounter with a text only to suffer the peculiarly scholarly alienation that occurs when transformative reading experience meets the discursive joust of the typical graduate seminar. [End Page 164] Each of the book’s six chapters plumbs a different strategy for resisting “the instituted structure of philosophy’s desire to know” (56). There is “reading essayistically,” a “slow, open-ended rumination that takes its time and returns, time and time again, to the matter at hand,” that is inspired by Theodor Adorno...

The hidden details of human dignity

Human dignity means understanding human beings as beings that, due to its specific characteristics that are specific to the human condition, has a special value that requires recognition and respect from society. Human being would be placed in the center of the world, occupying a preeminent place with respect to the other beings. Thus, speaking of a human dignity of all human beings, equal for all as human beings, supposes placing ourselves in a universal and unified vision as to what it is. Here then, the problem begins. It is easy to find references to human dignity in many regulations, especially in human rights, both in national and international norms. In these regulations we will find, easily, the use of the term dignity repeated several times to sustain a certain right or legal argument, but not to define what is precisely and properly human dignity. Then, everything goes well as far as we assume that we all know and equally understand what dignity is; However, when you ask a direct question on what is human dignity? the issue is not as equally clear for everyone, nor is there uniformity in what is understood by it or, what is worse, you simply notice that they really do not know what it is and that they have never reflected on it. Here you discover this intrigue that is not easy to clarify. It seems a problem that some resolve one way, others in another and others do not. This work will try to shed light for the clarification of this conceptual complication.

The Utility of an Empty Title. The Habsburgs as Dukes of Burgundy

ABSTRACTAlthough the Habsburgs never actually ruled the duchy of Burgundy, they persisted in using that ducal title from the late fifteenth until the opening years of the nineteenth century. This article explores four ways in which the title remained useful for the dynasty: to claim a preeminent place among the ruling dynasties of Europe, strengthen its position in the Holy Roman Empire, obtain diplomatic precedence, and secure its hold on the Order of the Golden Fleece. By exploring the resilience of the Burgundian claim it demonstrates the long-term importance of such empty titles in the construction of dynastic identity.