Rise Of Theory Research Articles

Using Machine Learning to Predict Pedestrian Compliance at Crosswalks in Jordan

This study employs machine learning (ML) techniques to predict pedestrian compliance at crosswalks in urban settings in Jordan, aiming to enhance pedestrian safety and traffic management. Utilizing data from 2437 pedestrians at signalized intersections in Amman, Irbid, and Zarqa, four models based on different ML algorithms were developed: an artificial neural network (ANN), a support vector machine (SVM), a decision tree (ID3), and a random forest (RF). The results have shown that local infrastructure and traffic conditions influence pedestrian behavior. The RF model, with its excellent accuracy and precision, has proven to be an excellent choice for accurately predicting pedestrian behavior. This research provides valuable insights into the demographic and spatial aspects that influence pedestrian compliance with laws and regulations in the local environment. Additionally, this work highlights the ability of ML algorithms to improve urban traffic dynamics. Policymakers and urban planners, particularly with the rise of theories and trends toward the humanization of urban roads, should firmly establish this understanding among themselves to create environments that make pedestrians safer. This strategy could be a measurable solution for international urban situations if future research focuses on integrating these prediction models with real-time traffic management systems to improve pedestrian safety dynamically.

Valor literário depois da Teoria: Derrida, Agamben e os Escritores do Não

A ascensão da Teoria na segunda metade do século XX foi percebida, por parte significativa da academia, como uma ameaça aos valores tradicionais da literatura e dos estudos literários. Produzida no ambiente pouco arejado e degradado da universidade moderna, a Teoria teria supostamente aberto caminho para discursos pouco racionais e voltados para o enfraquecimento do senso comum, da inteligibilidade textual e da objetividade. Foi, em parte, responsável não apenas pelo declínio da cultura e da literatura, mas, até mesmo, pela derrocada da moral, dos costumes e do humanismo. O presente ensaio trabalha a possibilidade de pensar a Teoria para além de uma perspectiva meramente negativa e em direção a uma proposta alternativa de valorização da literatura em textos exemplares de Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben e dos escritores do Não.

Responding to a complex world: Explorations in spatial planning

This article discusses three aspects in relation to Complexity Theory. First, from an understanding of time and space specificities in the rise of theories, it discusses the wider socio-political reasons that may account for the rise of complexity theory and its interest for planners today. The rise of the third sector in governance, the decentralisation of the nation state, the rise of informality, the exponential rise of information and knowledge in every sphere of human and non-human activity and the rise of new normative ideologies are argued to provide the social context for interest in complexity theory. Second, this article positions complexity theory within general social science theories and argues that complexity theory best suits the second-order realm of social science theorisation. Third, this article positions complexity theory within planning theory and suggests that complexity theorists within planning might engage with the theory in three ways. These are by suggesting new ways of ordering of society and space by configuring or re-configuring planning systems in the first order, unravelling new opportunities for actors to work in society and space with largely self-organised entities and finally by searching for and discovering new dynamics for systems in the first order in society and space.

The Book History of Theory

The Book History of Theory Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The rise of theory is a familiar story, and most histories account for particular theories and theorists, for instance Derrida critiquing the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss or Saussure on the way to inventing deconstruction. That is, most histories see theory as a chain of ideas. The commonplace figure of "the conversation" tacitly frames it that way—it is a dialogue of what's said, of statements and arguments. It is of course that, but it is not only that; the conversational model largely abstracts theory from its institutional and historical situations. Those situations might loom in the background—we often hear that the sixties provided the air that made contemporary theory breath—but they seem atmospheric. One way we might account for the institutional situation of theory is through its book history, and I think we need to develop this dimension of critical history. The books and journals and other publishing apparatuses of theory form the material channels that generate criticism, and they provide a concrete way to look at the operation of the institution and how it bounds the field and makes the rules for criticism in its time. Institutions sometimes seem to designate large impersonal forces or constraining disciplinary ogres, but like the rules of a game, they both create the conditions for, as well as limit the possibilities of, criticism. There is relatively little scholarly work on the book history of theory. As a point of contrast, there is a great deal of scholarship on the literary magazines and journals of modernism, and by extension there is a good deal of scholarship on the journals of the New Criticism.1 But there is little on what I have called the theory journal, even though the brief period between 1969 and 1979 saw more than thirty new such journals founded, as well other print channels of theory. One avenue of research might be looking at publishers. For instance, it would be telling to look in more depth at presses like Routledge, Minnesota, and Duke and the shift in academic publishing in the U.S. during the 1980s [End Page 443] and 90s.2 For instance, the rise of theory was not only recorded by Routledge, but Routledge spurred and shaped it, especially after the founding of its New York office in the late 1980s.3 I got a firsthand glimpse of its operation in 1989-90, when I was in the limbo between PhD and a proper academic job and worked there as an editorial assistant. I saw Bill Germano, the editorial director and commissioning editor for literature, and the other editors at work, and the parade of books they published around that time, such as H. Aram Veeser's collection The New Historicism (1989), Donna Haraway's Primate Visions (1989), Andrew Ross' No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), Diana Fuss' Essentially Speaking (1989), Gayatri Spivak's The Postcolonial Critic (1990), Stephen Greenblatt's Learning to Curse (1990), and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990).4 While he doesn't appear in most histories, I think Germano had a significant hand in making theory what it became and overseeing its development as a publishing category. I'd first heard of Germano when I was in graduate school and starting to read the main texts of deconstruction. It was the moment just after de Man's death, after he had just received a front-page obituary in the New York Times (1983) but before the front-page revelations of his journalism from World War II and two anti-Semitic articles (1987), and his influence was probably at its peak. In September 1985 there was a major memorial conference at CUNY, and in the lobby of the lecture hall was a table with stacks of de Man's recently published The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984). De Man had published only two books during his lifetime so the volume was something of an event, and perusing the preface I was intrigued to read that, according to de Man, the volume owed its existence to Germano, who was a young editor at Columbia University Press and had suggested it (1984, vii...

Introduction to Focus: Postcritique

Introduction to Focus: Postcritique Matthew Mullins (bio) In 1989 Robert Alter published a book entitled The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age in which he set out to rescue the study of literature from the overcorrections of literary theory. Alter initially saw the rise of theory as a welcome correction to a discipline that had historically been “underconceptualized.” These new rigorous theories of reading derived from philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics promised to revolutionize the discipline. But in Alter’s estimation theory overran literature and ultimately changed what the study of literature was about. “In fact,” he contends, “for many of the new trends in literary studies, the object of the preposition ‘about’ is often no longer literature.” Alter’s book was one of many salvos in the theory wars, a series of skirmishes over the place of theory in the discipline. Proponents and opponents alike typically represent theory as fundamentally political, while the alternative to theory—often termed anti-theory—is represented as apolitical. Under this rubric, Alter’s argument can be read as anti-theoretical, not because he saw theory as useless or harmful in itself, but because he didn’t believe that it belonged in literary studies: “… to give the new academic trends their due, such a person might be better off teaching sociology or history, psychology or political science, whatever the departmental aegis…such investigation surely has a legitimate place in the university.” But these approaches always end up treating literature as a “symptom of something else,” and for Alter this means that what the theorist is ultimately studying is not actually literature. Theory, he insists, has estranged us from the experience of reading and divided literary studies into sectarian groups. In her compelling book, The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski argues that the various sects of literary theory share an underlying commitment to and attitude of critique. For Felski, critique can best be understood as what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion and what Eve Sedgwick deemed paranoid reading. Critique, as she explains in her contribution to this issue, manifests itself in literary studies through a disciplinary commitment to “de words: novels and poems are widely hailed for deconstructing and demystifying, defamiliarizing and destabilizing.” She claims that critique has become the horizon of literary studies and wants to explore the possibilities of reading beyond critique, hence the emergence of the term “postcritique.” It might seem natural to some to align Felski with Alter and others who have argued that theory and its critical politics threatens to eclipse any and all other lights of literary studies. And this is how the formidable Bruce Robbins explains the critique/postcritique dynamic: as “political and apolitical criticism.” But is this the best way to conceptualize postcritique? Some may agree with Robbins that postcritique is the latest anti-theoretical salvo in the theory wars. Although the example is anecdotal, I recently attended a panel on the concept of “Anti-Theory,” and the participants who mentioned Felski or raised the subject of postcritique positioned it as the latest manifestation of anti-theory. But the reception of The Limits of Critique has been overwhelmingly positive and resolutely theoretical. The book has been reviewed warmly, beginning with my own essay in Los Angeles Review of Books, and including praise from theory champions such as Terry Eagleton in publications ranging from the Times Literary Supplement to Textual Practice. So where does the conflict lie? Anyone who views postcritique as a new fight in the theory wars will probably view postcritical reading as anti-theory and object that the definition of critique employed by postcritics is, in fact, a caricature of critique. The definition of critique tends to be the central point of contention in this conversation. Julie Orlemanski outlines the conflict in her excellent review below: “I know of no critical thinker worth engaging who would agree that one’s intellectual task is merely to ‘draw out unflattering and counterintuitive meanings,’ who would accept ‘skepticism as dogma,’ or who would recognize her scholarship as a ‘smooth-running machine for registering the limits and insufficiencies of texts’ or reading as ‘just a diagnostic exercise.’” Postcritique enthusiasts will say that literary critics are consumed...

Fantasies of Form

Reviewed by: Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine Sheila Liming (bio) Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. 192. $19.95 paper. "Is this what critics do?" This is the question lurking at the heart of Caroline Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), a recent work of literary criticism that seeks to merge disparate trends in literary scholarship via a renewed interest in form. Though Levine does not actually pose this question until chapter 4, her preceding discussion in this book is similarly characterized by such expressions of methodological self-reflexivity. Levine asks her audience to consider whether or not critics "spin out implied stories in which new forms take shape beyond a narrative's end," arguing that this is, in fact, what "most politically minded critics do" (110). For Levine, the critic is responsible not only for gauging and interpreting the formal structures that buttress the operations of social existence but likewise for creating those structures anew. And, to this end, Forms constitutes a clear attempt to bring considerations of "the social" to bear on a seemingly démodé fixation on literary form. Levine's Forms reads like a manifesto of sorts. It calls for "a new formalist method" (3), one that merges the pure aestheticism of New Criticism with the recognition of "political power and . . . situatedness" (14)—that is to say, with materialist critique. Levine surveys the historical shifts that led to critics' dissociation of these two modes of analysis en route to making her [End Page 661] case for their reincorporation. In chapter 2, for instance, Levine notes the ways in which, in the 1970s and '80s, discussions of "wholeness" contributed to the decline of formalist modes of criticism. With the rise of theory, she observes, came a suspicion for all things coherent and bounded, a suspicion prompted in part by presumptions about the variability of reader subjectivities and in part by a concern for the link between wholes and totalitarian ideologies. Here, Levine accurately characterizes the culture of incertitude that prompted formalism's ouster; the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for instance, similarly describes how like-minded materialists in the age of High Theory dismissed formalism on the basis of its root word, form, which Marxists saw as "as the 'mere expression' or 'outward show' of content."1 But Levine refrains from granting too much credence to this debate. In fact, she distances herself from it by redefining "forms" as "patterns of sociopolitical experience" (2). With the help of words such as "sociopolitical," Levine is constructing an admirable, if perhaps somewhat unwieldy, bridge between the recent trend toward aesthetic or "surface" priorities in literary criticism and materialism's historical insistence on the text's position in social and political life. Levine outlines five basic, categorical claims about how forms work: constraint, difference, intersection, portability, and political application. The most compelling of these is the notion of portability, or the observation that "forms travel" (4, emphasis original). Portability is the key to generalizability for Levine, and generalizability is—as she makes clear via her refusal to settle for too long on any one case study—the key that opens the door to critical extrapolation. For instance, in chapter 2, Levine, who is by all other counts a Victorianist, moves from a discussion of form in Mary Gaskell's North and South to a discussion of the seminar room as form, generalizing on themes of enclosure, spatial division, and transnational movement. Levine concludes this chapter by examining the seminar room as an instance of portable form; after emerging in Germany in the eighteenth century, Levine describes, the seminar as model migrated, catching on in other nations and "fostering originality and independence of mind by asserting a new kind of equality between teacher and student" (46). This interchangeable swapping of conceptual and material forms is a distinguishing feature of Levine's analysis, and while it can be disorienting at times, it nevertheless serves to reinforce the "newness" of Levine's approach since it speaks to her commitment to see form as "all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference" (3) [End Page 662...

A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction by Jerome McGann

Reviewed by: A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction by Jerome McGann Matthew Blackwell A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction. By Jerome McGann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 238pp. The digital humanities, that bastion of progressive scholarship (and funding) within the ongoing crisis in the humanities, is itself in crisis. The institutional framework in which humanities scholarship operates is built on print, and the shift to new digital models has been largely uneven. While university libraries are often at the forefront of the move toward digitization, academic publishing and professionalization in humanities departments lag behind in adapting to the new conditions of research. How should the requirements of tenure change when more and more research is born-digital? How should digital research institutes be housed within the traditional university infrastructure? Who should oversee the transfer of the physical archive to digital environments? And then, what do we do with all these books? According to Jerome McGann’s manifesto on the digital humanities, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction, the unlikely hero of this crisis is the seemingly anachronistic philologist. Philology hasn’t been completely outside of the conversation surrounding the digital humanities—David Greetham and James Turner are also recent proponents—but McGann’s book is the first full-length treatment of this “dryasdust” discipline’s current usefulness. McGann borrows his definition of philology from the nineteenth-century German philologist August Boeckh: “Die Erkenntnis des Erkannten,” or “The Knowledge of What is and has been Known.” This formulation of “is and has been” is a sorely needed corrective to the digital humanities’ tendency toward presentism. McGann argues that philology’s focus on the preservation of the physical archive, which has so often earned it the pejorative labels [End Page 141] of “pre-critical” and “pre-hermeneutic,” is necessary if we are to successfully navigate the various problems that arise as we look forward by looking back. McGann opens the first third of his book, “From History to Method,” with a simple and important question: Why does textual scholarship matter? In brief, it matters because the digitization of our material cultural inheritance, undertaken by commercial entities like Google, Chadwyck-Healey, and Gale as well as academic ones like JSTOR and the Digital Public Library of America, requires the perspective of the textual critic and book historian to account for the commonalities and differences between bibliographical and digital technologies. We have not yet invented a more perfect meaning-making machine than the printed scholarly edition, and if we are to reinvent such editions in the form of online archives we have much to learn from their use and design. Paper-based documents bear witness to the history of their own making, as D. F. McKenzie famously noted, but online archives put our cultural inheritance at risk through the invisible elisions inherent in their construction and maintenance. Thus, the return to philology, whose devaluation throughout the twentieth century is the theme of this opening section. The rise of theory, which found its apotheosis in Lyotard’s maxim that the purpose of philosophy is to “produce not the known, but the unknown,” tended away from the positivist, instrumental world of philology and toward abstraction. McGann traces this movement from the nineteenth century debate between Friedrich Nietzsche and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. At the time, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff easily won over against Nietzsche’s “fact-deficient” narrativizing of the archive, but Nietzsche’s philosophy found favor in the second half of the twentieth century. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s “fact-sufficient” assumption that the archive can speak for itself isn’t tenable after deconstruction, but his approach finds new force in the face of our current philological dilemma. The recognition that our documents have complex histories beyond their status as linguistic constructs is crucial as we attempt to minimize the inevitable distortions consequent to digitization. The second section, “From Theory to Method,” addresses the concrete problems of interpretation in print versus digital environments. For McGann, all interpretation is performative in the sense that it results [End Page 142] in a discrete product whose relation...

Laurence W. Mazzeno. The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon

Laurence W. Mazzeno. <i>The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon</i>

The violation of style: Englishness in Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels

This article explores the meaningfulness of ‘style’ as a critical concept in contemporary English literary studies. Despite appearing to have fallen out of fashion with the rise of theory in the 1970s, style remains closely linked to canons of historical thought. The article reflects upon how the vicissitudes of English literary style emerge from the historical conditions of upper class Englishness, particularly its ridiculing of Enlightenment abstraction. Through a close reading of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels (1992–2011), it is argued that style remains an ‘English’ inheritance, but that it has been infiltrated by the legacies of Nietzschean and psychoanalytic conceptions of modern subjectivity, and by the voices of literary modernism. The novel sequence disquietingly suggests that St Aubyn's protagonist, Patrick Melrose, was inducted into style when raped as a child by his father. Shorn of its aristocratic confidence, style appears by turns coercive and vulnerably self-conflicted. Violation bequeaths to Patrick a pointed and painful subject position in narrative and in language, as his subsequent addiction to baroque similes reveals; it also re-connects the novels’ celebrated literary elegance to a moment of constitutional violence.

Moral development: theory and applications

Part I. Moral Development in the 21st Century: Theoretical Roots and New Directions 1. Introduction 2. Classic Theories of Morality: Freud and Piaget 3. From Stages to Schemas: Kohlberg and Rest 4. Theoretical Challenges to Classic Cognitive Developmental Models 5.The Rise of Theories from Neuroscience and Evolutionary Perspectives 6. Global Perspectives: A Sampling of Research and Issues 7. Conclusion: In a Different Mind Part II. Applications of Theory to Practice 8. Applied Moral Education: Accomplishments and New Directions 9. Development Therapy: Helping Clients Grapple with Core Moral Issues 10. When Development Goes Awry: Deficits in moral and empathic development 11. Conclusion: How to Live and What to do?

The Creolization of Theory ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih

Reviewed by: The Creolization of Theory ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih Roxanna Curto (bio) Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih, eds. The Creolization of Theory. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. This volume examines the notion of “creolization,” from its origins as a “historical process specific to particular colonial sites”(viii) to its later use as a more general theme, applicable to cultural mixing and hybridity throughout the world. As the editors point out, the term “creolization” illustrates many of the dilemmas faced in the production and general application of theory, which develops out of a specific context. “Creole” was first used in the Caribbean and Latin America to refer to settlers of Spanish origin born in the New World, before it came to designate the cultural mixing of the Caribbean. With Édouard Glissant, an author and philosopher from Martinique, the term took on a more general, almost universal dimension, since he describes “creolization” as a process, one that has occurred not only in the Caribbean, but elsewhere as well. For him, it refers to an intense mixing of cultures to establish new ones. Accordingly, the authors of the volume define “creolization” both as an empirical, historical phenomenon that took place in the Caribbean as a result of the slave trade and colonization; and as a concept that describes a universal, dynamic process, one that has occurred or is occurring throughout the globe. In a passage quoted repeatedly in the volume, Glissant makes a key distinction between “créolité” and “créolisation”: “créolité,” best translated as “creoleness,” refers to a state, while “créolisation” to a process. In other words, while “creoleness” is a way of describing a particular kind of identity, one centered in the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean, in the former French colonies of Réunion and Mauritius, “créolisation” is an ongoing series of actions or events. Lionnet and Shih are particularly interested in how “créolisation,” as a broad historical process, has been appropriated—both explicitly and implicitly—by “French theory,” especially with respect to the study of minority, colonial and postcolonial cultures. According to the editors, these scholars face the challenge of using theory, with its generalizing tendencies, to analyze concrete events and situations, without losing an engagement with politics. The editors’ objective is twofold: first, to raise questions about the forms that theory can take with regard to postcolonial, ethnic and Francophone studies; second, to pose fundamental questions about the state of the academy, including the place of theory within it. The lengthy introduction is in itself a significant theoretical essay about the relationship between theory and ethnic and postcolonial studies within the academy. It presents an extended reflection upon the interface [End Page 165] between theory and practice, and the notion of “creolization.” Lionnet and Shih state as their goal to theorize relations between peoples, at a time when the death of theory is frequently announced. As they indicate, the rise of theory in the “global 1960s” often involved the reading of French thinkers in English by American intellectuals, who depoliticized it, largely ignoring the generative context of the Algerian War, as the radical writings of Césaire, Fanon and Khatibi were put into dialogue with Hegelian, Nietzschean, and Sartrean thought. Lionnet and Shih write that during this time period, interrelations between peoples and cultures were transformed by decolonization (of which they consider the Civil Rights movement to be a part), the Vietnam War, and the resulting critique of Western rationalism and civilization, events which led to the institutional formation of ethnic studies and Francophone studies in the U.S. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part, “Creolizing Methodologies,” comprises four chapters that consider the notion of creolization as a concept that prefigures the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism and postcolonial theory. In “Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political,” Barnor Hesse writes about the history of “creolization” in the New World (both as a term and a practice), and its relationship to politics. He emphasizes that what ties creolization to the political is the question of race, and explores the implications for Western liberal and radical democratic theories (including humanism), which “routinely...

Scholastic Probability as Rational Assertability: The Rise of Theories of Reasonable Disagreement

Abstract:The scholastics used

The Graduate Student I Was, the Graduate Courses I Teach, and What Theory's Got to Do with It

How can we tap the extraordinary potential of “theory” in graduate feminist training, while at the same time circumventing some of its hazardous consequences? Having earned her degrees before the rise of theory, the author witnessed not only the intellectual excitement it generated in feminist conversations but also its rise to a prominence that qualified its productivity both in the classroom and in doctoral dissertations. By reintegrating literature and literary history in discussions of theoretical insights, students can stretch, undermine, qualify, or extend them. Literary and aesthetic specificities help young scholars move toward original, publishable insights by extending or contradicting, supplementing or supplanting the abstract generalizations posed by the theorists they study.

History’s Challenge to Criminal Law Theory

After briefly sketching an historical account of criminal law that emphasizes its longstanding reach into social, commercial and personal life outside the core areas of criminal offenses, this paper explores why criminal law theory has never succeeded in limiting the content of criminal codes to offenses that fit the criteria of dominant theories, particularly versions of the harm principle. Early American writers on criminal law endorsed no such limiting principles to criminal law, and early American criminal law consequently was substantively broad. But even with the rise of theories in the mid-nineteenth century that sought to limit criminal law’s reach, codified offenses continued to widely and deeply regulate social life and exceed the limits of those normative arguments. This essay suggests that this practical failure of criminal law theory occurred because it was never adopted by an institutional actor that could limit offense definitions in accord with normative commitments. Legislatures are institutionally unsuited to having their policy actions limited by principled arguments, and courts passed on the opportunity to incorporate a limiting principle for criminal law once they began, in the Lochner era, actively regulating legislative decisions through Constitutional law. The one avenue through which criminal law theory has had some success in affecting criminal codes is through the influence of specialized bodies that influence legislation, especially the American Law Institute advocacy of the Model Penal Code. But the institutional structure of American criminal law policymaking permits an unusually small role for such specialized bodies, and without such an institutional mechanism, criminal law theory is likely to continue to have little effect on actual criminal codes.

Digital heritage and the rise of theory in museum computing

Abstract This paper is concerned with the emergence of a subject now called digital heritage, and considers where it has come from and in what form it might progress. The paper contrasts the rise of theory within the subject of museum studies with the more practical preoccupations of its sub-discipline, museum computing. It highlights the emergence of more sociological and theorised readings of museum computing (what is termed here the cultural turn within the subject's approach), alongside the co-ordinated expansion of research activity in this area, particularly through inter-governmental sponsorship. The early showings of a critical framework for this new active discipline are then explored, and a series of trajectories for enquiry and approach are suggested and stressed, including an engagement with'change', an acknowledgement of the agency of new media, a recognition of the value of historical methodologies, and the aspiration for a more nuanced discourse.

Teachers and Philosophers

Ihe philosopher J. L. Austin once observed that we might be tempted to call oversimplification the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation (38). If he could speak that way of philosophers, what would he have said of us teachers, whose job requires us to simplify, and who look to philosophers to keep us from going over the edge? Even as we perform before the public, we picture ourselves performing before philosophers. In my proudest classroom flights I still see my old philosophy professor, listening in, ready to croak, Too simple. I am like Cicero's orator, struck dumb in mid-gesture by the discovery of a Greek in his audience. The rise of theory has not moved the philosophical presence further away. Theorists are philosophers. Picturing a theorist in the audience, one who sees more in words than one has ever thought to see, can intimidate in the old way. And more often. There are very few subjects I can talk about these days without feeling, as certain words rise in my throat, the old tightening in the tongue. By now many teachers, I suspect, keep a mental list, a sort of tongue-tighteners' dictionary, of words not to be risked, or to be risked only in auricular quotation marks. And it is not hard to guess what words their lists share. The word truth,