Procrustean Bed Research Articles

You’ve Made Your Procrustean Bed, Now Lie In It

The Mark Twain AnnualVolume 8, Issue 1 p. 55-58 You’ve Made Your Procrustean Bed, Now Lie In It LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEY, LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEYSearch for more papers by this author LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEY, LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEYSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 November 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-2597.2010.00040.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume8, Issue1November 2010Pages 55-58 RelatedInformation

English words on the Procrustean bed: Polysyllabic shortening reconsidered

The polysyllabic shortening hypothesis holds that the duration of a primary stressed syllable is inversely proportional to the number of additional syllables within the word. We examine the evidence for this process in British English speech by measuring the duration of primary stressed syllables in monosyllabic, disyllabic and trisyllabic words, both right-headed series – e.g. mend, commend, recommend – and left-headed series – e.g. mace, mason, masonry. In contrast with some of the original studies of polysyllabic shortening (e.g. Lehiste, 1972), we record target words both when carrying nuclear pitch accent and when unaccented. As in previous studies, we find strong evidence of polysyllabic shortening in accented words, an effect of comparable magnitude in right-headed and left-headed words. In unaccented words, polysyllabic shortening is minimal or absent, but there is evidence, supporting previous studies, of domain-edge effects localised to specific sub-syllabic constituents. Unlike these effects, which occur on both pitch-accented and unaccented words, polysyllabic shortening of the primary stressed syllable in these data is confined to pitch-accented words.

Spirituality and reductionism: three replies

Several authors have commented on my reductionist account of spirituality in nursing, describing it variously as naïve, disrespectful, demeaning, paternalistic, arrogant, reifying, indicative of a closed mind, akin to positivism, a procrustean bed, a perpetuation of fraud, a matter of faith, an attempt to secure ideological power, and a perspective that puritanically forbids interesting philosophical topics. In responding to this list of felonies and misdemeanours, I try to justify my excesses by arguing that the critics have not really understood what reductionism involves; that rejecting reductionism is not the same as providing arguments against it; that the ethical dilemmas allegedly associated with reductionist views are endemic to health care; that 'reifying' is what believers in the spiritual realm do; and that the closed minds belong to those who dismiss reductionist science without having studied its achievements.

The Procrustes' Bed and Standardization in Education

Procrustes' Bed A book of Greek mythology was one of the readings I greatly enjoyed during my college years. I was fascinated by the various legends and stories of gods, heroes, and monsters featured in the book. Now almost twenty years have passed since I read the book. Many details of the stories have slipped away from my memory, and some stories are gone altogether leaving no trace. Yet, there is one story that left an everlasting impression on my mind--the story of Procrustes. Procrustes was a crook from Attica, who took the lives of many innocent people passing by his fortress gate. Most of his victims were travelers who were new to the area and unfamiliar with him. With disguised hospitality, Procrustes approached travelers passing by his residence and made a generous offer of a free night's stay. Tired from their long walk, travelers usually accepted the offer with gratitude. Unfortunately, none of those who stayed at Procrustes's house left the place alive. The shadow of death fell on each guest as the night fell. As soon as they were in bed and asleep, Procrustes would tie them tight and measure their height. The unit of the measure Procrustes used was the length of his bed. If the guest was taller than the length of the bed, Procrustes cut off the parts of his limbs that reached over the length of the bed. If the guest was shorter than the bed, he was stretched out until he fit the full length of the bed. This barbarous practice of torturing and murdering people by Procrustes continued until he was slain by Theseus, a legendary king of Athens. Procrutes' killing spree was mindboggling and the bloody images of the murderous story were quite gruesome. What was especially striking about the story, for me, was the insanity of Procrustes deforming human bodies to make them fit the length of his bed. The horrors of Procustes' bed seem synonymous with people trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Sadly, I find the phenomenon of standardization and testing in current national school policies to be strikingly similar to the inhuman practices of Procrustes, in terms of hobbling our students learning in a misguided push for uniformity and standardization. Standardization: The Procrustean Bed of Education Standardization is a unifying education process, providing the same curriculum and expecting the same learning outcomes for all students. This uniform practice of education has been a dominant phenomenon of schooling in the United States over the last two decades. The central philosophy driving standardization in public schools is standards-based accountability, using students' scores on standardized tests as an index of educational progress. These scores are used by policymakers to impose, potentially severe, consequences on school communities showing less progress or failure. Standards-based accountability, a cardinal principle of the government's efforts in education reform today, began to draw enormous public support when an educational report, A Nation at Risk, was published in 1983. Creating unparalleled repercussions within the political and media arenas, the report posited that the curriculum content offered at public schools was scant and far from substantial, that the quality of education in America was deplorable, that students in the United States were out-performed by their counterparts in other competing industrialized nations, that public education in America was in total disarray, and that public education in the United States would risk the nation being left behind and losing their long-enjoyed leadership in the global economy. The report continued to claim that in order to fix the problem of school ineffectiveness and to overcome the risk the nation faced, an extensive reform in education was needed and that standards-based learning should be the future direction. Just as the report, A Nation at Risk (1983), was sensational when it was released, the standards-based reform, offered as a panacea for the failures of performance in school education quickly attracted much attention and support. …

The Legal Framework for Public Service Broadcasting after the German State Aid Case: Procrustean Bed or Hammock?

The Legal Framework for Public Service Broadcasting after the German State Aid Case: Procrustean Bed or Hammock?

Universality of International Law from the Perspective of a Practitioner

The ESIL Conference at which this article was originally presented as the Keynote Speech was devoted to the topic of “International Law in a Heterogeneous World”. The article attempts to demonstrate that heterogeneity does not exclude the universality of international law, as long as the law retains – and further develops – its capacity to accommodate an ever larger measure of such heterogeneity. After developing three different conceptions, or levels, of what the term ‘universality’ of international law is intended to capture, the article focuses on international rules, (particularly judicial) mechanisms, and international institutions which serve the purpose of reconciling heterogeneous values and expectations by means of international law. The article links a critical evaluation of these ways and means with the different notions of universality by inquiring how they cope with the principal challenges faced by these notions. In so doing, it engages a number of topics which have become immensely popular in contemporary international legal writing, here conceived as challenges to universality: the so-called ‘fragmentation’ of international law; in close connection with this first buzzword the challenges posed by what is called the ‘proliferation’ of international courts and tribunals; and, finally, certain recent problems faced by individuals who find themselves at the fault lines of emerging multi-level international governance. The article concludes that these challenges have not prevented international law from forming a (by and large coherent) legal system. Most concerns about the dangers of fragmentation appear overstated. As for the ‘proliferation’ of international judicial institutions, the debate on fragmentation has made international judges even more aware of the responsibility they bear for a coherent construction of international law. They have managed to develop a set of tools for coping with the undesirable results of both phenomena. Despite some evidence of competition among international courts for ‘institutional hegemony’, such competition has hitherto been marked by a sense of responsibility on the part of all concerned. Thus, from the viewpoint of a practitioner, the universality of international law is alive and well; there is no need to force the law into the Procrustean bed of ‘constitutionalization’.

DDC 주류구분법에 관한 연구

이 논문은 DDC의 주류설정에 대한 논리성을 규명하는데 목적이 있다. 어떤 분류법이든 군집화와 순차화가 선행된다. 주류설정은 군집화과정이다. 군집화 과정속에서 2차적으로 순차화가 고려되는 것이다. 따라서 분류법에서 군집화는 분류표를 구성하는데 가장 중요한 요소이다. 그렇기 때문에 주류설정에서 논리성이 강하게 요구되는데 DDC에서 각 주류는 특수도서관 개념에서 출발하였기 때문에 논리성은 약하다. 그러나 역사적 사실을 통해 주류설정의 논리성을 규명하고자 하였다.

Preface

Preface Peter L. Rudnytsky The task of an editor can be likened to that of the dream-work, at least insofar as one of my aims is that of secondary revision—that is, forging a unity out of the often heterogeneous assemblage of materials that make up an issue. In this instance, I fear I have been less than fully successful. Although I toyed with the idea of giving this number the title "Traces and Echoes," it seemed in the end to be the better course simply to play my strongest card, namely music, except insofar as the elastic word "meaning" can be stretched to encompass the concerns of Anne Golomb Hoffman and Sharon Talley with the body and literature in their respective contributions. Fortunately, since both Hoffman and Talley are making their second appearances in American Imago under my editorship, I can incontrovertibly claim them as "my" authors, and I therefore hope they will forgive me for confining them metonymically to this Procrustean bed. (For those who want to go back and read or reread their earlier work, Anne Hoffman's "Is Psychoanalysis a Poetics of the Body?" was featured in our Winter 2006 issue, while Sharon Talley's "Following Thoreau's 'Tracks in the Sand': Tactile Impressions in Cape Cod" led off our Spring 2005 issue.) No less fortunately, the quality of the papers by both Hoffman and Talley requires no apology. Indeed, to those who aspire to publish their work in our pages, I can give no better advice than to emulate these essays, which are exemplary in their intellectual rigor, lucidity of exposition, range of scholarly reference, and the profundity of their engagement with psychoanalysis. Hoffman takes us through nothing less than the history of concept of the body as an archive, from the rise of the "science" of physiognomy in the eighteenth century, through the iconography of hysteria in the photographs of patients at the Salpêtrière, to Freud's conception of hysterical symptoms as an archive of unconscious meanings. For her part, Talley sets her [End Page 1] sights on Ambrose Bierce, best remembered for his Civil War stories, and deploys the framework of generative death anxiety, as well as an informed understanding of attachment and object relations theory, to offer a comprehensive reassessment of Bierce's life and work. Her essay culminates in close readings of two sets of fascinating texts, the four tales that constitute The Parenticide Club and "Visions of the Night," comprised of three persistent nightmares. In convincing fashion, Talley shows how Bierce's writings have roots that extend beneath his adult experiences as a Union soldier into his childhood, and also how his insights into dreams and unconscious mental life anticipate the discoveries of psychoanalysis. The music portion of our program had its inception in the session of the Discussion Group on Music and Psychoanalysis, synergistically co-chaired by Julie Nagel and Alexander Stein, at the Winter 2008 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. There, Leo Rangell, past president of both the International and the American Psychoanalytic Associations, as well as a long-time patron of this journal, presented "Music in the Head: Living at the Brain-Mind Border," to which Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, responded in virtuoso fashion with his reflections, "What Good Is Music?" including an autobiographical narrative about how music helped him to cope, far though he found himself from New York City, with the events of September 11, 2001. Rangell's paper, too, is deeply personal—indeed, self-analytic. It invites the reader to join him in examining through "a neuro-otologic-psychoanalytic prism" how, in the aftermath of a bypass operation he underwent in 1995, he started involuntarily "hearing" all manner of songs and melodies, a veritable "sound track of his life," as the saying goes. I have no doubt that both these papers will themselves linger in the minds of those who read them, and I thank the distinguished authors for the privilege of publishing their work. The paper by Michele R. Kelly provides a fitting coda to the Rangell-Steinhardt duet. For Kelly, looking back on her love/hate relationship with the piano as an adolescent...

Deadly Aversion Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Judgment

Deadly Aversion Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Judgment Keally McBride (bio) Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment. Jennifer L. Culbert. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Paper, $21.95; Cloth $55.00. I take guilty pleasure in tracing how legal decisions and their rationales are built around hollow centers, places where the real issue lurks and the law avoids treading. A decision about life or death is transformed into the more straightforward task of instructing juries. Or, a decision about the nature of marriage devolves into a discussion of adoption procedures. Jennifer Culbert’s Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment refuses to follow the courts down such detours and instead grapples with the core away from which they studiously maneuver. And while the book’s material comes from capital punishment jurisprudence, it keeps its focus on the central question in law: what are the grounds upon which decisions are made? Culbert holds that capital punishment jurisprudence reveals the shifting metaphysical grounds of judgment and thus betrays a deep anxiety at the core of legal authority. While her argument is developed through an extensive reading of capital punishment cases, the book will resonate with audiences well beyond scholars who specialize in this field. The book makes a particularly strong contribution to the field of political theory, as it traces how our ideas, not just our social and political dynamics, come to be reflected in institutional practices. Culbert takes Nietzsche’s history of metaphysics as her starting point. In each different stage of this “history of an error,” “philosophers try to grasp what is but fail and then look for reasons to explain their inability to comprehend the ‘thing-in-itself.’” (7) From dialectics to spiritualism, moral imperatives, positivism, utilitarianism and finally practical nihilism, Nietzsche traced the evolving — and in his view increasingly desperate — grounds upon which we have tried to stake our claims to knowledge and being. Culbert’s argument explains the evolution of death penalty jurisprudence along these same stages, beginning with the relinquishment of an outside and absolute source of certainty in Furman v Georgia. She then builds a chapter around each of Nietzsche’s subsequent stages of metaphysics, connecting it to a distinct moment in capital punishment jurisprudence. When I first realized that this was how the book’s argument was structured, I became concerned that this approach would feel overly schematic and forced. Admittedly, the device feels more stretched at a few points than others, but Culbert weaves her argument in such a way that the framework seems to serve more as a unifying foundation than a Procrustean bed. The questions addressed here are pressing. Given that the Furman decision acknowledged the fallibility of the court, what are alternative foundations from which the court can decide to end the life of offenders? Without recourse to absolutism outside of this world, how does the court reconcile its worldly fallibility with the permanence of death? While many books have investigated the texts of what the court has said and the political mobilization around the death penalty to explain American exceptionalism, Culbert’s approach is different. In fact, she sidesteps the question of whether the death penalty is right or wrong, instead focusing on what death penalty jurisprudence can tell us about our larger metaphysical crisis. One popular strand of capital punishment scholarship traces the logic espoused by the courts though its circuitous journeys; another examines the world outside of the court to explain how juridical decisions reflect the historical and political pressures of the day. Culbert chooses instead to look into that space which the court itself tries to avoid, examining the grounds upon which the courts assert their ability and privilege to judge: “Can we define who deserves death? The answer is obvious: yes, of course we can. We define who deserves death every day. The question is then how we define who deserves death.” (140) While the issues of life and death in capital punishment provide the imperative to reflect upon the grounds of judgment, Culbert’s argument seeks to illuminate American justice more broadly. She argues there is a crisis of metaphysics at hand; we...

Hide and Seek: On Teaching God to Be a Better Exemplar

Hide and Seek: On Teaching God to Be a Better Exemplar Jack H Bloom Like my biblical namesake, I have had a lifelong struggle with the God of Abraham who it is reported entered a covenant relationship with my ancestors at Sinai. From time to time, God and I busy ourselves in a sporadically engrossing though all too often tedious game of “hide and seek.” For long periods of time we just ignore each other. As a liberal often skeptical rabbi, I am respectful of others’ traditions and beliefs while holding in my fashion reverence for the formulations about the nature of God that my covenanted people have affirmed down the generations. That covenant, paradoxically both unaltered yet constantly in flux, is at its root, a relationship that has not and cannot be superseded by any other. I am bound to it. Sitting quietly one Sabbath morning in synagogue during the public reading of the Torah,1 I found myself desultorily attending to a number of probably for good reasons, obscure Torah passages, With a start, I was aware that another “go‐around” with God had begun. Disturbed by what I was hearing, I looked to the commentators who adorned the bottom half of the pages of biblical text I held in my hands. Their task now as ever, was to explain and elucidate the textual reading for the understanding of the Jews of whatever era they lived in. My attention was piqued, as I followed some “modern” commentators doing verbal cartwheels to make “difficult” texts consonant with the idea of a benign, perfect divine being, who having created the world loves all its inhabitants, while still maintaining a special, loving covenantal relationship with the people Israel, despite their often being recalcitrant and obtuse. A relationship described retrospectively by Jeremiah with the distortion typical of a long‐married disputatious couple.2 Jewish tradition, text based, takes the words of Holy writ seriously. When I read that a prominent rabbi put into print as an accurate reading of holy writ that. the Torah speaks of God as a parent, a lover, a teacher and an intimate sharer of our hearts.3 I was shocked by the distortion. To the astute reader that is not even close to the whole truth. God is all too often anything but all‐loving. Being in serious denial about the nature of the Deity with whom we are in relationship, commentators, old and new, struggle to make God’s behavior fit an all‐loving procrustean bed. I listened at another time to the obscure story of a man gathering sticks, perhaps some tinder, on the Sabbath who broke what was until then unwritten legislation. Now when the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man picking wood on the Sabbath day. They brought him near, those who found him picking wood, to Moshe and to Aharon, and to the entire community; they put him under guard, for it had not been clarified what should be done to him. YHWH said to Moshe: The man is to be put to death, yes, death, pelt him with stones, the entire community, outside the camp! So they brought him, the entire community, outside the camp; they pelted him with stones, so that he died, as YHWH had commanded Moshe.4 What got God so upset that even after a pause—time to cool the divine anger, time to consider compassion, God summarily invokes a law promulgated after the fact, and demands the public stoning of the unfortunate gatherer by the whole community. The superb Torah Commentary, Etz Hayim,5 used in the congregation I founded, and now attend on Sabbath mornings, exemplifies how even modern erudite commentators perplexed in their own words, by the “apparent” severity of the narrative, let the enraged God off the hook: The wood gatherer, therefore, was not just violating one law but was destroying the dream that Israel would be a people obedient to God’s ways.6 That is a most interesting use of the word “apparent” by the modem spin‐doctor. What happened was not apparently severe; it was cruel beyond any rationale that might mitigate God’s instruction...

Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare O. Bradley Bassler (bio) Angus Fletcher , Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Harvard University Press, 2007), 185 pp. Angus Fletcher's new volume Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare considers the impact of the "New Science" on the culture of renaissance English poetry. In ways a revaluation of the Elizabethan world view, the book is more ambitious than Tillyard's classic work in its attempt to look for the core motivation behind the New Poetry in the transformation rather than the perpetuation of cultural strands. Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry rewrote the terms for considering the current development of the American poetic tradition; his most recent volume is even more ambitious in scope, revamping the landscape of poetry in the English language. It is out of a twinned sense of cultural destabilization and aspiration occasioned by the New Science's overthrow of the medieval world view that Fletcher's portrait of the "New Poetry" emerges, set against the probing backdrop posed in the question "whether the human yearning for fixed cynosures is not the actual source of long term instability." In terms of this paradoxical dialectic of stability and instability, Fletcher traces the drama that the New Poetry itself plays out upon the stage of early modern literary history. The early modern natural philosophers developed a counter-language set against the traditional Aristotelian description of natural motion, with consequences for the classical Aristotelean idea of dramatic unity as well. In the Aristotelian vocabulary, "things had to act like persons." The point of the reverse translation Fletcher identifies in the New Poetry is not to make persons act like things; rather, this reversal makes possible a precedence of human actions over human character. If the qualitative description of nature which Aristotle promotes is transferred to the dramatic domain, then what wears itself on its external sleeve, so to speak, are precisely human actions. The linguistic consequence of this reversal is that actions are taken up into words and then redoubled in the dramatic re-presentation of action, leaning heavily on the theatrical sense of "drama." To mine this theatrical sense, Fletcher focuses intensively on the metrical structure of poetic language: how it simultaneously conveys quantitative rhythm and emotional expression. In this respect, it is the twin of music. Motion is taken up into language at an almost presemantic level, but one which [End Page 342] stands in intimate proximity to what, following Fletcher, we might call "semantic crossover." Most interesting are those cases like Donne's and Shakespeare's, where the metrical structure of poetic expression is loosened from strict metrical devices but in a way which not only preserves but in fact intensifies the musicality of language. The need for a wresting of metrical rhythm from all Procrustean beds leads to Fletcher's insistence that "the drama gives the moving action its embodiment." To convey the dramatic, in particular, action must outstrip commentary. And so there is a critical issue of tempo in the dramatic presentation of action, for in reality we act "on the fly," with niceties of comprehension traveling in action's wake. It is just this pacing of dramatic action which saves it from the threat of rigidity always faced by allegory, and which makes possible the dynamic sense of forward motion which is needed for plausible embodiment. As Donne remarks in a passage Fletcher cites, there is never "[t]ime enough to have beene Interpreter / To Babells bricklayers," as is reflected particularly in the "rapid verbal transport" of the then raging pamphlet wars. Fletcher cites also Anthony Nutall's diagnosis of the rhythms of Timon of Athens in "the curious way in which Shakespeare's mind continually races ahead of itself," and it is such racing which makes possible that trait of Shakespeare's characters' capacity to overhear themselves which Harold Bloom identifies throughout the Shakespearean corpus. No doubt this explains in part Bloom's particular fondness for Macbeth's "proleptic imagination," which Fletcher glosses in terms of "an insane drive to accumulate and annihilate the traces of his past, whipping them into his future, before...

Latinos/as and White Racial Frame: The Procrustean Bed of Assimilation

When North American slavery was established in the 1600s, an interpretive perspective was developed that sought to justify the institution of African American slavery. This composite perspective, a “white racial frame,” was later extended by whites to other racial groups such as Latinos/as. This racial frame, which has become white “common sense,” includes important racial stereotypes, understandings, images, and inclinations to act. Various forms of this racial framing exist among different U.S. racial groups, but a strong white racial frame has prevailed because whites have long had the power and the resources to impose this reality. A hegemonic situation occurs when people of color consent in various ways to this white racial framing and common sense. This acceptance varies. We discuss four forms of consent to white racial framing that appear in our in‐depth interviews in a national sample of Latinos/as. Three forms reference Latinos: acceptance of elements of the racial frame, active enactment of the racial frame, and internalized violence. The fourth use of racial framing is directed by Latinos at African Americans.

Procrustean Beds and Strange Bedfellows: On Literary Value as Assigned by Literary Theories

This paper explores how valuation in theory-driven literary interpretation tends to shift from literature to theory. It starts out by considering the etymology of the term interpret and makes the point that, as its Latin root pretium suggests, at least an attenuated sense of value is part and parcel of interpreting. The paper briefly touches on the drawbacks of current theories of literary value – the institutional view (e. g. by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen), the ideal-critic view (e. g. by Alan Goldman) and the value-maximizing theory (by Stephen Davies) – and finds them all problematic in one way or another. One point that none of them deals with is the move by literary theorists, especially when theory was spelled with a capital ›T‹, to shift valuation from literature to theory, so that literature becomes mere fodder for expounding particular theoretical views.

Brain and Being. At the boundary between science, philosophy, language and arts

This collection of papers comes out of a meeting held at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy, in November 2002. The aim was to explore the possibilities for dialogue between workers in quantum brain theory and in the humanities, in particular art, philosophy and language. Although there have been attempts to reconcile the cognitive and brain sciences with the humanities, the tendency is for the humanities to be fit to the Procrustean bed of the computational brain as wet computer. The extension of the quantum revolution in physics to quantum neurophysics might open a true cooperative dynamics.

New Actors in a Financialised Economy and the Remaking of Capitalism

The term capitalism comes with a great deal of anachronistic, non-reflexive, non-deconstructed baggage. The ‘c word’ evokes the idea of a reified system with an immanent inner principle so that cap...

‘Logical empiricism’ and the philosophy of science

'Philosophy of science' suggests to many a highly technical project that offers logical analyses of scientific and metascientific terms a perspective that may not greatly appeal to historians, sociologists, or scientists. This image of philosophy of science owes much to a common understanding of logical empiricism (nee positivism), a project that seemed to attempt to force all of science, and all of our understanding of science, into the Procrustean bed of formal logic. George Reisch laments this vision of the philosophy of science, and seeks to complicate it in a novel way, by arguing that logical empiricism might have bequeathed to us a very different philosophy of science. In so doing, he conducts us through a history of logical empiricism in its European phase during the 1920s and 1930s. He recovers the socialist agenda then at the heart of logical empiricism, and notes its alliances with progressivist wings in early twentieth-century American philosophy. He then offers a history of the technical and apolitical project that philosophy of science has become. As the title telegraphs, Reisch argues that the Cold War led the logical empiricists many of them immigrants from Germany or Austria, often Jewish, and often with socialist leanings away from their youthful political engagement, towards philosophical isolationism. That there is an important political history to the philosophy of science in the twentieth century is largely unknown to many in the profession. Most philosophers of science tacitly endorse a 'liberal neutralist' account of science: they believe that scientific knowledge

Pentecostalismo Brasileiro Clássico e Secularização

Nosso ensaio é constituído de três partes. Na primeira, conceituamos o pentecostalismo brasileiro clássico a partir de dados do Censo 2000 e de estudos históricos, demonstrando que a ênfase dos cientistas da religião e da mídia no neopentecostalismo, em detrimento do pentecostalismo clássico, é inversamente proporcional ao tamanho deste e daquele, de fato.

The International Financial Architecture and the Limits to Neoliberal Hegemony

Unlike neoliberalism, [the] new financial architecture recognises the limits of a disembedded global economy. Yet, rather than seeking to rein in the forces of liberalisation by re-embedding intern...

Ukraine or Little Russia? Revisiting an Early Nineteenth-Century Debate

This article contributes to the existing literature on the “History of the Rus’,” at once the most mysterious and the most influential product of Ukrainian Cossack historiography, in three major respects. First, it challenges the dominant historiographic trend that treats the “History” as a manifestation of growing national self-awareness of Ukrainian elites. Second, it contributes to the perennial search for the author of the “History” by claiming that the manuscript was written soon after 1800, effectively locating the work in the realm of nineteenth-century historiography. Third, it attempts to identify the author and title of the work that provoked the “History of the Rus’“—an approach overlooked or deemed impossible of realization by all students of the “History.” More than anything else, however, this article takes the debate out of the Procrustean bed into which it was forced by the national narratives of a later era, both Ukrainian and all-Russian. It emphasizes the simple fact that historians have little control over the use of their narratives.

Imagination in German Romanticism: Re-Thinking the Self and Its Environment by Jeanne RiouMusic and Literature in German Romanticism by Siobhán Donovan, Robin Elliott

MLR, I0I.4, 2006 I I71 into the volcano and the renewal of the polis as corresponding modes for seizing the favourable moment. At the beginning of Chapter 7Honold shows how Holderlin, in the hymn-draft 'Wie wenn der Landmann', uses an ancient topos to establish a con nection between nature and history. He argues that Empedocles achieves Napoleonic greatness in his capacity as 'Religionsstifter' (p. 354). In particular, the philosopher is presented as 'Inaugurator einer neuen Kalenderordnung' (p. 390) because he exhorts the citizens of Agrigentum 'den Gottern der Natur ein Fest zu bringen' and thus echoes the revolutionary festivals in France (p. 364). The long concluding chapter considers the great elegies as Holderlin's effort to reconcile divine and human time through ritual and celebration, as in 'Brod und Wein' (p. 396). Honold identifies the 'Friedensfiirst' of 'Friedensfeier' with Napoleon and the festival itself with the various festivals of revolutionary France; at the same time, he argues for the 'synoptic quality' of the poem, which combines antiquity and Christianity in its 'syncretistic rituals and festivals' (pp. 447-48). In conclusion, he discusses 'Der Einzige' as a 'coda' that recapitulates all the various themes of his book: a remembrance of the 'naturzyklische[] Grundlagen des Gotterkosmos und der Kalenderordnung' (p. 463). At times, to be sure, Honold pursues his thesis a bit too single-mindedly, as in his almost routine identification of H6lderlin's many 'Feste' with French revolutionary celebrations, and his Procrustean bed causes him to ignore aspects of poems taken as a whole, especially the longer elegies and hymns. His search for the esoteric sometimes leads him to overlook the obvious. Is not Gibbon as powerful an example of the theme of decline and fall asVolney's Les Ruines (I79 )? Surely Goethe's Werther provided an obvious model for the seasonal symbolism of Hyperion. The contrast of past and present that dominates Goethe's 'Euphrosyne' and Schiller's 'Der Spaziergang' both thematically and structurally lay nearer at hand than the festivals of Eleusis when Holderlin was seeking temporal patterns for his own elegies (see my The Classical German Elegy I795-I9 50 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I980)). Could such a time-conscious poet asHolderlin have ignored the fiercely debated controversy be tween the Neunundneunziger and the Nullisten regarding the proper date for the new century, which intrigued not only Goethe and Schiller but all the Romantics? (See Die deutschen Sdkulardichtungen an der Wende des i8. und I9g.Yahrhunderts, ed. by August Sauer (Berlin: Behr, I90I).) Such considerations would have strengthened Honold's central argument without leading him as far afield as do some of his often distracting excursuses. Finally, when did German publishers start omitting indexes from these dense Habilitationsschriften? In sum, however, Honold's rich and provocative project lends substantial body to the generally familiar framework of Holderlin's obsession with time, astronomy, and the French Revolution. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY THEODOREZIOLKOWSKI Imagination in German Romanticism: Re-thinking the Self and its Environment. By JEANNERiou. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2004. 262 pp. ?30; $50.95. ISBN o-8204-7198-4. Music and Literature inGerman Romanticism. Ed. by SIOBHANDONOVAN and ROBIN ELLIOTT. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. 233 pp. $75; /50. ISBN i 57II3-258-9. These two fine volumes on key aspects of German Romanticism not only demonstrate the necessity of pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to this period of German litera ture and culture; they also provide examples of the respective virtues (and hazards) of a scholarly monograph and a collection of essays by experts from different fields. I I72 Reviews Jeanne Riou undertakes the ambitious task of situating the role of the imagination inGerman Romanticism within the context of shifting paradigms in science and phi losophy since the Renaissance. Until that time, she argues in her introduction, the notion of human beings as microcosms linked them with the natural world, whose four elements provided the bases for the theory of humoral pathology inmedicine. With Descartes, the human mind isno longer connected to themechanical operations of the body, and it becomes the task of thinkers from Leibniz to Schelling to recon ceive the relationship of body, mind, and soul to one another and to the surrounding world. After tracing...