Wilson's Analysis Research Articles

Jefferson on Display: Attire, Etiquette, and the Art of Presentation by G. S. Wilson

Reviewed by: Jefferson on Display: Attire, Etiquette, and the Art of Presentation by G. S. Wilson Elizabeth Cook (bio) Jefferson on Display: Attire, Etiquette, and the Art of Presentation. By G. S. Wilson. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Pp. 308. $29.50 cloth; $29.50 paper) In Jefferson on Display, G. S. Wilson explores Thomas Jefferson's use of material culture to create and manage his public image (p. 4). This ultimately created two contradictory personas: the cosmopolitan Francophile and the American man of the people. Jefferson then deployed these personas strategically to forward the United States' position on the global stage and his own ambitions for the young nation. Jefferson on Display follows Jefferson through his time as a foreign minister, secretary of state, vice president, president, and retired sage of Monticello. This temporal framework emphasizes the decades when [End Page 334] Jefferson's public appearance was most notable and most important. Wilson dedicates two chapters to each of these periods, which allows him to explore the inherent tensions (cosmopolitan/yeoman or Jefferson's actions/outside observations) of Jefferson's choices. These tensions are strongest in the earlier chapters, where Wilson matches Jefferson's personal archive against outside commentary, such as when Wilson uses Jefferson's accounts to track how Jefferson adapted his personal economy to the needs of the French Court and contrasts those accounts with commentary offered on his appearance and behavior. This tension dissipates in later chapters, as Wilson relies more heavily on others' observations of Jefferson without the balancing effect of Jefferson's own thoughts. Over time, Jefferson slowly becomes less central to his own performances, while friends, colleagues, enemies, and artists take on increasing roles in structuring the Jefferson on display. The role of slavery in enabling Jefferson to create and maintain his various personas receives minimal treatment in Wilson's analysis. The institution of slavery and the labor of enslaved individuals not only funded Jefferson's cosmopolitanism but also enabled him to consistently display it. James Hemmings, trained in France as a chef, created the sophisticated meals served at Jefferson's table at Monticello. Jupiter Evans, once Jefferson's valet then his hostler, cared for the horses Jefferson so prized. These enslaved individuals, and numerous others, played a prominent role in Jefferson's ability to maintain his material world and their efforts warrant a deeper consideration than Wilson offers. The strongest element of Jefferson on Display is undoubtedly Wilson's material culture analysis. Cut, color, and fabric choice all played roles in Jefferson's sartorial strategies, whether he sought to adhere to the rules of the French court, shape a new political office, or mildly offend his visitors. Even something so simple as shoelaces became a signifier of Jefferson's predilection for innovation and his attempts to incorporate American society into a global culture through the use of such objects. The material cultural analysis is equally strong in Wilson's readings of images of Jefferson. The use of sets, props, and color [End Page 335] choices varied by artist and by presumed audience, but each artist who took Jefferson's likeness deployed material culture as a way to tie Jefferson to a particular political moment. This either cemented his association with that moment, such as Trumbull's The Declaration of Independence, or forwarded his ambitions, as in Tiebout's and Edwin's 1801 engravings of Jefferson as the newly elected president. G. S. Wilson's Jefferson on Display offers an intriguing approach to an enigmatic individual. By focusing on the material realities of Jefferson's life, the man himself takes on a dimensionality that humanizes him while also offering insights into the cunning potential of his mind. The tight focus on Jefferson allows Wilson to dive deeply into the source material and provide readers with insights into the choice and meaning of the objects Jefferson chose to use to strengthen his position in the young American republic and to strengthen the republic's position on the global stage. Elizabeth Cook ELIZABETH COOK is an architectural historian for the Nevada Department of Transportation. She is currently researching the construction history of Virginia's public buildings. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

The bitter end: apocalypse and conspiracy in white nationalist responses to the Islamic State attacks in Paris

ABSTRACTWilson's article examines how apocalyptic thinking converges with the use of conspiracy theory in white nationalist world-views at a time of crisis. Apocalyptic thinking is, typically, a religious response to secular threats to the faith community that prophesize, or are attendant on, the End. These millenarian outlooks provide communities in crisis a promise of confirmation of the object of their faith, the vanquishing of enemies and, crucially, continuity for the community in a better world to come. In the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, apocalypticism and conspiracy theory have tended to coincide. The tendency towards a binary distinction between terms of absolute good and absolute evil, and the revelation of secrets relating to human destiny through prophesy or ‘truth-seeking’ provide a broad transposability between the two interpretative strategies. An increasing amalgamation of political paranoia and eschatology have given rise to what has been termed ‘conspirituality’. Much recent white nationalist rhetoric can be understood as emerging from this discursive position, and Wilson's analysis will demonstrate how one white nationalist community drew on conspiratorial apocalypticism in its response to the multiple attacks by Islamic State in Paris on 13–14 November 2015.

Perceptual Pragmatism and the Naturalized Ontology of Color.

This paper considers whether there can be any such thing as a naturalized metaphysics of color-any distillation of the commitments of perceptual science with regard to color ontology. I first make some observations about the kinds of philosophical commitments that sometimes bubble to the surface in the psychology and neuroscience of color. Unsurprisingly, because of the range of opinions expressed, an ontology of color cannot simply be read off from scientists' definitions and theoretical statements. I next consider two alternative routes. First, conceptual pluralism inspired by Mark Wilson's analysis of scientific representation. I argue that these findings leave the prospects for a naturalized color ontology rather dim. Second, I outline a naturalized epistemology of perception. I ask how the correctness and informativeness of perceptual states is understood by contemporary perceptual science. I argue that the detectionist ideal of correspondence should be replaced by the pragmatic ideal of usefulness. I argue that this result has significant implications for the metaphysics of color.

The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War, by James Graham Wilson

James Graham Wilson The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 264 pp $29.95 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-8014-5229-1Few presidents have left as complicated and politically charged a legacy as Ronald Reagan. Partisan pundits have played a preponderant role in shaping Reagan's legacy, some hailing him as a master strategist and others reviling him as a simpleton and supporter of dictators. Gradually, however, a limited body of so-called revisionism has begun to emerge. Historians and political scientists, writing with the benefit of temporal distance from the 1980s and increased access to sources in the United States and around the world, have begun to produce accounts of the Reagan administration's foreign and domestic policy successes and failures in a balanced, apolitical manner.James Graham Wilson's The Triumph of Improvisation is an important contribution to this body of historiography. Wilson, a historian at the US Department of State, takes a refreshingly long view of the end of the Cold War. Rather than focus on specific events such as the Reykjavik summit or the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wilson treats the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War as the result of a long chain of events spanning more than a decade. He traces this process from its beginnings in the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through to its conclusion with Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. But he sees little continuity or coherence in US policy across these years, noting a distinct lack of grand strategic vision. No master plan explains the end of the Cold War, Wilson argues. Instead, improvisation by key individuals made it possible (2-3).The Triumph of Improvisation focuses on the role of individual leaders in shaping foreign policy and in turn the international system. Four figures are at the centre of Wilson's analysis, along with a host of supporting characters. President Ronald Reagan entered the White House with complicated views regarding the Soviet Union and the Cold War. He wanted to both precipitate the dissolution of the Soviet Union and abolish nuclear weapons, which would necessitate collaboration with the Kremlin (10-13). George P. Shultz, who served as Reagan's secretary of state from July 1982 to the end of the administration, actively encouraged Reagan to act upon his predisposition to negotiate with the Soviets (65). Shultz believed that negotiation and strength were not mutually exclusive and was unafraid to make that case to hardline elements within the administration as well as to the general public (200). George H. W. Bush, Reagan's vice-president and successor, moved to the Oval Office during a time of relatively reduced tensions. Bush identified a way to end the Cold War not predicated upon the destruction of communism in the Soviet Union: a Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe and the transition of those countries to democracy (156). His restraint and patience after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wilson argues, was a major factor in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War (201). …

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance Margo Natalie Crawford James F. Wilson . Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 195, illustrated. $49.50 (Hb). Now that we know that the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance was not heteronormative, how do we analyse the cultural movement's fluid performance of sexuality and race without fixing and normalizing its queerness? How do we begin to develop a language that does not name the unnamed and unintentionally translate the performance in cultural movements into a non-moving object of study? In Harlem Renaissance studies, we have "looked for Langston" and "queered the color line," and now we need more studies like James Wilson's Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, [End Page 399] and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance that approach a queering of the queer. Wilson does not make a meta-claim about the queerness of the Harlem Renaissance. As opposed to a relying on the frame "queer," he foregrounds "drag" as he makes us think about drag as, literally, the "underground" weight countering the ascendancy of racial uplift. Wilson's study ranges from the drag of Lulu Belle (the white woman impersonation, in blackface, of a sexually free, black working class woman) to the "bulldagger" drag of Gladys Bentley. His focus on the drag of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the touristic aspects of the movement, leads to an appreciation of the drag performances by white and black performers as the deformation and slowing down of the normative white viewer / black performer tourist show. He reads Alice Handy (W.C. Handy's daughter) as the "Madam" (a most respectable one) who promised to provide "thrills" during her guided tours of Harlem. As he uncovers the eroticism in advertisements, like Handy's, for Harlem tours, he opens up a new way of thinking about the tourism that shaped this movement. There were constant detours, taken by white and black people, during the tours. People took everyday detours around the tours that have now become the dominant archive of the cultural movement. Wilson uses the term "semi-private" as he moves away from the rent parties that can be documented through public invitations to the rent parties that were "semi-private," anti-heteronormative, and advertised through word-of-mouth underground channels, invitations that cannot now be translated into a concrete archive. These other rent parties remain semi-private as Wilson analyses them. The beauty of the text is his impulse not to convert the happenings into a normative archive. As he explores the happenings, some of the most compelling parts of the text are the stories and figures that can only be partially known through the records of the movement. We can, for instance, only partially know Sepia Gloria Swanson, the black, male cross-dresser whose performances as a white woman diva lit up the Harlem underworld. Wilson's analysis of the unknowable as the unrecorded fully surfaces when he focuses on Wallace Thurman's collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp in the writing of the play Harlem (1929). Thurman, in an unpublished essay entitled "My Collaborator," laments the lack of a "movietone camera" that, during his writing sessions with Rapp, could have captured the "picture of Bill Rapp, excited over the possibilities or difficulties of a scene, leaping from his chair, pacing the floor, frantically gesturing the while he shouts Negro dialect with decided East Side overtone" (56). In the most engaging parts of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies, Wilson adopts the approach of an alternative type of movie camera that reconstructs the gestures, "leaping," and "pacing" that produced the written texts and the formally staged performances. The study sometimes fully gestures toward the [End Page 400] anti-textual performance-studies approach, encapsulated in Diana Taylor's insistence that the archive cannot contain the "live" (Taylor 173). Wilson's analysis of Gladys Bentley adds a new twist to our understanding of the tension between the live and the archive. Years after her Harlem Renaissance performance of the butch swagger, Bentley, in 1958, performed heteronormativity in a "live," television...

The Propriety of Confucius: A Sense-of-Ritual

In the philosophy of Confucius, the concept li is both central and elusive. While it is often translated ‘ritual’ or ‘the rites,’ I argue that there are numerous significant ways in which li is as much an internal property of individuals as it is an external set of rules or norms. I discuss li as deference, as developed dispositions, as embodied intelligence, and as personalized exemplary conduct. Finally, reflecting on the work of Fingarette, and Hall and Ames, as well as Wilson's analysis of their work, I argue that the external aspect of li, although reasonably understood under the rubric of ‘traditional norms,’ may nonetheless legitimately evolve, and that this coheres well with the notion that an internal sense-of-ritual is integral to the meaning of li.

Tense over time: testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model as an account of the pattern of tense-marking provision in early child English

The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE in longitudinal data from eleven English-speaking children between the ages of 1;10 and 3;0. The results show, first, that there were systematic differences in the provision rates of the different morphemes; second, that there were systematic differences in the rate at which all of the three morphemes were provided with pronominal and lexical subjects; and, third, that there were systematic differences in the rate at which copula BE and auxiliary BE were provided with the third person singular pronominal subjects It and He and the first person singular subject pronoun I. These results replicate those of Wilson (2003), while controlling for some possible objections to Wilson's analysis. They thus provide further evidence against the generativist view that children's rates of provision of different tense-marking morphemes are determined by a single underlying factor, and are consistent with the constructivist view that children's rates of provision reflect the gradual accumulation of knowledge about tense marking, with much of children's early knowledge being embedded in lexically specific constructions.

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870

Reviewed by: Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870 Laura Miller (bio) Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberg, eds. Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 496 pp. $52. Deep passions among relatives, wayward kin attempting to claim inheritance, tasty strawberries, and sheepherding are not solely the territory of Thomas Hardy. Instead, these are among the topics addressed in Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, an ambitious collection in the Transformations series from MIT Press. Heredity Produced, edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, has an interesting lineage of its own. Since 2001, the editors have been part of a research project at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin that investigates heredity's cultural history. This collection includes essays from participants in the institute's workshops, as well as solicited contributions from other scholars. Heredity Produced contains nineteen essays and is organized into five sections: Heredity In the Legal Context; Heredity and Medicine; Natural History, Breeding, and Hybridization; Theories of Generation and Evolution; and Anthropology. For those who teach undergraduate history of science classes, or who have a more general interest in the topic, the editors have announced that a companion volume, aimed at a broader audience, is in preparation. One goal of this collection is to understand how the "knowledge regime" (15) of heredity functioned during the centuries prior to its conceptual solidity. Power, legality, and race—topics important in contemporary discussions of heredity—are also crucial to a historical understanding of heredity. The collection sets out to evaluate the turning points that helped compose this knowledge regime, per its title situating itself "at the crossroads of biology, politics and culture." Each of the collection's contributors peers down one, two, or sometimes all three, avenues of this crossroads. [End Page 144] The collection is strong on biology, even in unlikely places. Readers who bypass the section on Heredity in the Legal Context to concentrate on Heredity and Medicine would miss relevant information: David Warren Sabean's descriptions of the ways that Galenic or Aristotelian views were reproduced in discourses on early modern marriage and Silvia De Renzi's analysis of when physical resemblance began to be used as evidence in paternity cases. In the section on Heredity and Medicine, Carlos López-Beltrán tracks the term "heredity"'s transformation from being used as a metaphor for understanding traits to being understood as a cause of those traits. López-Beltrán considers the ways that changes in medical discourse from 1600 to 1800 both influenced and were influenced by changing perspectives on inheritance. Later in the volume, Ohad S. Parnes considers a similarly shifting perspective from the standpoint of genetics: "the establishment of heredity as a universal scientific category was the direct result of a wider epistemological shift . . . namely, the conceptualization of populations in terms of generations" (316). Within the field of biology, the collection's other topics range from Philip K. Wilson's analysis of Erasmus Darwin's writings on gout to François Duchesneau's considerations of why cell theory and heredity were slow to align. Whereas Roger J. Wood studies changes in the ways sheep breeders understood inbreeding as a useful preparatory step to controlling the breeding process, Nicolas Pethes considers a different sort of animal experiment in "'Victor, enfant de la forêt': Experiments on Heredity in Savage Children." Marc J. Ratcliff studies Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne, who engaged with several disciplines, "the grower's know-how, botanical theory, and aristocratic conceptions of descent" (207), in the construction of a genealogical tree for strawberries. Rather than giving the impression of a random series of unconnected essays, the studies in this volume share rigorous methodologies and compelling interpretations of how heredity evolved as a concept. Broader essays, such as Staffan Müller-Wille's "Figures of Inheritance: 1650–1800," illustrate long-term developments in the understanding of genealogy. Müller-Wille uses figures such as William Harvey, Linnaeus, and Charles Darwin to depict "a shift from vertical relations of descent to horizontal...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What Should Historians Do with Heroes?: Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What Should Historians Do with Heroes?: Reflections on Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Britain

Comments

Comment by Henry Levin Schools operated by for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs) have been around for only a decade. They were established with strong optimism about the potential of business solutions to problems in education, in a climate of acute concern about how to improve poor educational results for urban youth. It was argued that in contrast to the failures of public school bureaucracies, business acumen and incentives to succeed would provide innovation, intense focus on educational achievement, more efficient school organizations, and superior results. Venture capitalists were attracted by the promise of making inroads in an industry accounting for hundreds of billions of dollars a year and the assumptions that large profits could be extracted by eliminating bureaucratic waste. A decade later, it is clear that these early expectations have not come close to fulfillment. The industry has lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and as Steve Wilson reports, the evidence on academic effectiveness of EMOs is scant.46 Although Wilson also discusses one not-for-profit organization, the heart of his analysis is concentrated on the for-profit EMOs. Wilson's analysis is innovative in two ways. First, he has interviewed executives in the major EMOs to get a picture of the obstacles they encountered in their quests for success. Second, he uses this information and other insights to suggest directions for renewal and potential future success of the EMOs. To my [End Page 126] knowledge, his is the only study that has sought information from key officers in the EMOs as a means to understand the effect of management organization involvement in education over the past decade. Inherent Conflicts Among key findings from Wilson's interviews are themes that have not emerged in the past. The most interesting of these, for me, is what Wilson calls the leadership challenge. It is a dictum of educational reform that strong and proficient school leadership is at the heart of an effective school. The educational literature suggests that leadership is premised not only on the personal attributes and skills of the principal but also on his or her commitment to ideas about what works, based upon experience and research evidence, and willingness to seek continuous improvement. Educational management companies face the difficulty of selecting school principals who are entrepreneurial and willing to take risks but are also willing to adhere religiously to the rules, procedures, and school design that define the school's brand identity. As Wilson aptly notes, the hiring of school principals who accept blind allegiance to every company practice and regulation is not consistent with the entrepreneurial, risk-taking, improvement-seeking model of school leadership. This conflict is so fundamental that Wilson refers to it as a "paradoxical requirement" that has not been satisfactorily resolved and has created continuous problems in finding good school management. In large measure, this conflict arises from the principal's requirement to address the needs and concerns of his or her clients—students and their parents—while simultaneously attempting to maintain the site-to-site uniformity and consistency required by company policy for brand-name schools. Meeting client expectations in a consumer-driven market often requires some adaptability to demonstrate responsiveness to perceived educational needs. For example, decades of experience with nursery schools has shown that it is difficult for brand-name or corporate chains of preschools to eke out market share when competing with large numbers of small, individual schools that are highly personalized and thereby better equipped to address family concerns. The mom-and-pop operations inspire considerable loyalty from their students' families because of personal relationships with teachers and administrators and school practices that they believe meet their needs. Adaptability of educational practices to local needs and preferences, within an overall philosophy, is a prominent feature of such markets. For example, Montessori schools have a specific philosophy of child development and [End Page 127] education. Personnel must be trained and certified by approved Montessori agencies, and schools are monitored to meet Montessori practices. Yet...

What you don't learn at the bench...conclusions from the EMBO/ELSF-organised meeting on career prospects in the life sciences.

Europe's academic research in the life sciences is facing a crisis. Numbers of students entering the universities to study the natural sciences are falling, and an increasing number of researchers are leaving the academic realm to accept better paid positions in the growing biotechnology business, in government, journalism and other sectors. No wonder that politicians fear a dearth of talented researchers to fill positions at universities and research institutions. This looming crisis has prompted many senior scientists and politicians to look to the reasons underlying the increasing labour shortage and discuss how to make a career in the natural sciences—and Europe as the geographical location for that career—more attractive for young people. As Gottfried Schatz, President of the Swiss Science and Technology Council, noted in his opening talk at the meeting, it is not that Europe produces inferior scientists to the USA—Europe's record in scientific publications is witness to the opposite—merely that they are not properly nurtured. A microbiologist, let's call him Fritz, he added anecdotally, who had done his Ph.D. in Switzerland and postdoc at Northwestern University in the USA, then returned to Europe to find he was ‘trapped in the morass of a fuzzy unclear career structure’. After some years trying to find a position as an independent researcher, ‘he was thinking of crossing the Atlantic once again, this time with a one‐way ticket’, noted Schatz sombrely. ‘We in Europe are doing a worse job in furthering the people we have’, he asserted; identifying the main problem in Europe, and setting the agenda for the meeting. Indeed, it is not only unclear career structures and prospects that ultimately drive many young scientists away from Europe. Equally, the uncertain career prospects deter many bright high school students from choosing to study the life sciences in the first place. Whether …

Understanding Religion: The Challenge of E. O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson's fundamental challenge is to bring knowledge and sensibility into an effective working relationship. Both ambivalence and opaqueness characterize his analysis of religion. Ambivalence refers to his conviction on the one hand that religion is essential for societal well‐being and genetically resourced and his prediction, on the other hand, that religion will be superseded by scientific reason; the opaqueness refers to his strange insistence that religion be subjected to tests of literal facticity, whereas, in contrast, the arts are exempted from this test, because they constitute a delivery system that impacts the sensibilities directly, with no particular concern for literalness. Wilson's analysis of religion should be brought into consonance with his view of the arts, thereby recognizing the importance of myth, symbol, metaphor, and analogy in religious formulations and their status as direct delivery systems to the sensibilities. Wilson's distinction between empiricist/materialist and transcendentaliist worldviews is reshaped by distinguishing between metaphysical and methodological transcendentalism. This reshaping enables us to recognize how the action required by human existence depends both on scientific knowledge and symbolic formulations that extend to human action, even though certain knowledge is lacking.

A Tax Competition Analysis of Congestible Public Inputs

This paper investigates the provision of congestible local public inputs within a tax competition framework. Public input provision is financed by a business capital tax and by a profits tax on firms as a congestion tax. With this tax system, local tax and expenditure policies are inefficient because of potential capital outflows. The tax mix is inefficient in that the profits tax rate is too high relative to the capital tax rate. The level of public input provision is inefficiently low. Focusing on expenditure inefficiency, this analysis of public inputs is compared with Wilson's analysis (Journal of Urban Economics, 1995, 38, 333–356) of congestible public goods.

Dreamy mental states in late 20th century neurology

In 1895 Sir James Crichton-Browne lectured on the dreamy mental states that had largely gone unnoticed until his old friend John Hughlings Jackson had first recognized them nearly 20 years earlier as a component of some epileptic seizures. In 1897 Jackson described the association between such dreamy states and pathology in the uncinate gyrus of the brain, thus delineating the phenomenon of uncinate (temporal lobe) epilepsy. Crichton-Browne's account of dreamy states is easier to follow than Jackson's various writings on the subject, and makes it clear that such states are not always epileptic in nature. Jackson believed that epileptic dreamy states were not due to the brain areas responsible being involved by the epileptic discharge itself, but were release phenomena resulting from the discharge inactivating higher levels of brain function. In the century since Jackson, there has been little advance in understanding of the detailed mechanisms of production of the various abnormal psychic experiences which occur in these dreamy states which, following Kinnier Wilson's analysis 1928, are now more usually considered in terms of their individual components.

A concept analysis of autonomy.

The nursing profession places a high value on the acquisition of autonomy as a requisite for professional status. Although the literature is replete with studies that examine autonomy and nurses, methods and results often are inconsistent and inconclusive. Review of the literature reveals ambiguous or absent definitions of autonomy. Nursing commonly confuses autonomy with related concepts such as authority, accountability, power, professionalism, and independence. A concept analysis of autonomy is done using Walker and Avant's modification of Wilson's analysis procedure. This highly abstract concept emerges as a discrete, empirically definable term referring to a potential human quality in an existing state. The analysis includes antecedents, consequences, defining attributes, model and borderline cases, and empirical referents.

Prostitutes and Persons

The modern history of the common law has shown how legal forms and procedures, as much as the substance of law, reflects and maintains patterns of difference and inequality in social relations generally. Typical of this history are the infamous 'person's cases' of the early twentieth century in which by dint of allegedly 'neutral' legal mechanisms women were denied economic and political 'personhood' for the purposes of holding public office. Before being overruled by the Privy Council, Chief Justice Anglin of the Supreme Court of Canada found, for instance, that on the basis of women's common law disability there were no precedents for admitting women into public political life,2 and Barker J held it to be the 'law of the Creator' that the 'paramount destiny' of woman was to be 'wife and mother', and so the applicant could not be admitted to the practice of law.3 On one level, the significance of these cases is easily represented as a paradigm example of how the natural and ordinary meanings of words may be compromised by judicial bad faith. In Sachs and Wilson's analysis, these cases illustrate how the apparent neutrality of universal rules of precedent and statutory interpretation is inevitably subverted by the conceptual apparatus of judges.4 On another level, however, these cases demonstrate that the meaning of words is never 'natural', 'plain' or 'ordinary' at all, and that even the least obviously vague or ambiguous are susceptible to (ideological) interpretation. On this view, a gendered, 'extraordinary' (for law) understanding of the word 'person' was

Making sense of social experiences and moral judgments

In a recent review of James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense,(1) Alan Ryan observed that the book s astonishingly ambitious and at the same time disarmingly restrained.(2) I believe that most readers of The Moral Sense would readily agree with this observation. The book is ambitious not only because, as Ryan notes, Wilson aims to our everyday moral intuitions,(3) but also because Wilson attempts to do so by integrating most of the relevant areas of scholarship - including philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, religion, politics, education, and evolutionary biology. The book is disarmingly restrained because, as Ryan also notes, Wilson aims to rehabilitate our moral intuitions without pushing any public policy agenda.(4) Indeed, Wilson's book is all the more disarming because it appears to be inclusive and balanced in accounting for the innate and the learned, nature and nurture, the individual and the group, freedom and constraint, the old and the modern, self-interest and sympathy for others. Wilson's analysis is broad and inclusive; he supports his position with knowledge of research findings from many fields. At the same time, he omits or dismisses out-of-hand much of immense significance for morality. Especially, Wilson minimizes writings of some highly recognized thinkers and largely ignores the role of rationality or judgment in his analyses. From my limited knowledge of moral philosophy, he appears to exclude a very significant body of thought. From more extensive knowledge of developmental psychology, I do know that reasoning is now regarded as central (along with emotions) by most who have directly studied children's morality (to be sure, there are many differences in explanations of developmental processes, the contributions of biology and culture, the relations of judgment and action, and so forth). In Wilson's view, however, moral reasoning is mainly the province of the scholar or the rather than the person, whose natural, commonsense moral views are based, to a much greater extent, on emotions. This contrast between scholars and ordinary persons is revealing of Wilson's general position. He states that science has challenged common [viii], resulting in some people talking themselves out of the moral sense most of us possess. Argumentation, justification, and intellectual analyses, for the most part, do not stand us well in the moral realm. Instead, it is our feelings that matter: In fact, when people act fairly or sympathetically it is rarely because they have engaged in much systematic reasoning. Much of the time our inclinations toward fair play or our sympathy for the plight of others are immediate and instinctive, a reflex of our emotions more than an act of our intellect, and in those cases in which we do deliberate ... our deliberation begins not with philosophical premises ... but with feelings - in short, with a moral sense. The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments that they employ. [7-81] Moreover, feelings translate into moral ideals through habits (moral ideals arise out of habitual human behavior [243]), and not intellectual analysis. One of the theoretical constructions of scholarly intellectual analyses has been the idea of complete individual autonomy, an idea resulting in such moral ills as drug abuse, street crime, and political corruption [234]. This kind of moral populism moves me to ask a question I am unaccustomed to asking: Am I an ordinary person? As a social scientist conducting research on children's moral development (and other related topics) and theorizing on topics like moral reasoning, moral conduct, culture, and education, I suppose I am not in Wilson's world view an person. But I do not normally ask myself this question because I do not categorize people this way. I assume that most people have expertise in the realm of morality and that there is as much variety in views among the general public as among philosophers or social scientists. …

Commentary on "Understanding Pennzoil v. Texaco": Rational Bargaining and Agency Problems

pROFESSORS Mnookin and Wilson's analysis of the multi-billion dollar lawsuit between Pennzoil and Texaco is an imaginative contribution to the study of bargaining in the shadow of the law.' This Commentary examines the authors' answer to the question of why Texaco and Pennzoil took so long to settle their dispute after the jury entered its verdict. In passing, it also considers their explanation of why the stock market apparently discounted the combined value of Pennzoil and Texaco by over $3 billion while the case was pending. For Mnookin and Wilson, the parties' failure to settle soon after the jury verdict in Pennzoil Co. v. Texaco, Inc.2 presents a challenge to economic theory. As they see it, there is little reason to think that the parties or their lawyers had radically different assessments of the probabilities of possible outcomes. What is more, shareholders the costs of the continuing litigation were enormous. Mnookin and Wilson conclude that with the parties in substantial agreement on the outcome and extraordinary costs in prospect, [t]he relevant economics literature suggests that the parties to the dispute should have settled quickly for some amount that permitted them to share the avoidable extra costs of the litigation. Yet the litigation was not settled for more than two years, after multiple appeals and a costly bankruptcy filing by Texaco. The authors attribute this apparent departure from profit-maximizing rationality to a conflict of interest on the part of Texaco's board of directors. Mnookin and Wilson contend that from the directors' perspective continued litigation was preferable, not because it benefited shareholders, but because it

Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government and the Modern Congress: The "Universal Principle" of Change

In Congressional Government Woodrow Wilson analyzes change in Congress during its first century of development. This essay argues that Wilson's analysis of the 19th century Congress, which explains congressional behavior as an outgrowth of both institutional and societal forces, provides a more useful interpretation of change than the institutionalist perspective dominant in the specialized studies of the modern Congress. The essay illustrates the value of Wilson's analysis to contemporary scholars by tracing its impact on the evolution of the author's interpretation of the congressional reforms and changes of the 1970s. The essay attributes the continuing value of Congressional Government to its broad and unified portrait of Congress as a whole.