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This chapter focuses not on the exegetical accuracy of Jay Garfield and Graham Priest's reconstruction of Nāgārjuna, but on the implication that Garfield and Priest draw from this reconstruction. They argue that Western philosophers haven't seen an ontological paradox of the sort that Nāgārjuna is interpreted as presenting and, thus, that Western philosophers can learn an important lesson from Nāgārjuna. Their claim that Nāgārjuna can provide us with something new indicates the problematic nature of their overall project.

This chapter introduces ‘dialetheic’ approaches, according to which Liar sentences are both true and false, indeed both true and not true. (Some contradictions are accepted.) Dialetheism provides another way (in addition to restricting excluded middle) to retain the Intersubstitutivity Principle, but some who believe in dialetheism (such as Priest) prefer to give up the Intersubstitutivity Principle. The rationales for going one way or the other on this, the topic of gluts and gaps, and the relation to the classical glut theories of Chapter 8 are discussed.

Priest has argued that his dialetheic theories declare themselves sound and in this regard are better than non-dialetheic theories. This chapter shows this to be unfounded. Indeed, dialetheic theories cannot on pain of triviality declare modus ponens to be truth-preserving, and those that accept excluded middle declare it not to be. Moreover, Priest's favored dialetheic theories say that modus ponens doesn't preserve truth even when applied to premises we accept. In this respect, they do worse than glut theories in classical logic and weakly classical theories. This however is not a problem for all dialetheic theories.

Do dialetheic theories do better as regard revenge problems than theories that restrict excluded middle? This chapter argues that they do not, and shows in particular that each of the revenge problems that Priest has raised against theories without excluded middle arise against dialetheic theories as well. The charge that dialetheic theories can't express the property of being solely true is investigated. It is found that a full defense against the charge requires a transfinite sequence of weaker and weaker negation-like operators, reminiscent of the sequence of iterations of the determinacy operator in theories that restrict excluded middle.

This chapter explores the tradition of the seventy two (later seventy) translators brought to Alexandria from Jerusalem along with texts of the Torah. Tradition had it that King Ptolemy II Philadelphus sent an embassy to the High Priest and commissioned the translation for the great Alexandrian library. It emerges that here, as often, memory and myth are intertwined, and tradition is not wholly to be dismissed. The Septuagint's ‘charter text’, the Letter of Aristeas, contains an inseparable mixture of fact and fiction. It is suggested that the narrative evinces an ambivalent attitude to the King, in common with other literary reflections of the period. Extra twists are provided by the Jewish author's dual heritage.

Accounts of personal identity that are grounded in experiential continuity are by no means new. This chapter compares the merits of C-theory with some of its competitors. According to one tradition, the self is an experiential ingredient within consciousness. The doctrine can be found in William James, C. O. Evans, Stephen Priest (the latter holds that the self can be identified with phenomenal space), and Galen Strawson. These accounts all have the disadvantage of restricting the self to a single stream (or burst) of consciousness, the C-theory does not. John Foster and Peter Unger also defend experience-based accounts which allow subjects to survive periods of unconsciousness, but their accounts also prove problematic, albeit for different reasons.

Dialetheists think that their rejection of ex falso quodlibet means that they cannot be saddled with the claim that anything whatsoever is true. But what precisely is wrong with trivialism, as Priest calls the position that everything is indeed true (and also false)? Might not the actual world be trivial, even if we are constrained (as Priest argues) to think that it is not? But such a dialetheist realism is one that most philosophers would find intolerable, and this paper argues that, to the extent that arguments for dialetheism prove hard to resist, they therefore provide a reason for being anti-realist about discourse capable of expressing dialetheia. In particular, they provide a reason for adopting a fictionalist version of dialetheism in which it is only fictional that a word like ‘true’ stands for a genuine property.

This chapter discusses the two Middle English narratives directly inspired by the Roman de Renart, the thirteenth‐century poem The Vox and the Wolf and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale. The view that these two texts are more properly classed as fables is contested, and it is shown that their narrative style is heavily influenced by the Renart in each case. The Vox imitates the episodic structure of Branch IV of the Renart and reproduces the fox's fantastic description of the heaven that lies at the bottom of a well, while the Nun's Priest's Tale borrows from Branch II, the cock's warning dream, which becomes the centrepiece of the intellectual dispute between Chauntecleer and his wife. In their different ways, both works abandon the sparse narrative and moral seriousness of fable, revelling instead in the power of language to structure and restructure the world.

chapter 5 demonstrates that Julian partially draws on Jews to model his highly innovative priestly program. Jewish priests exemplify the priestly life Julian lays out for his Hellenic priests in ep. 89b, and they execute laws laden with theurgic wisdom. Specifically, their observance of the dietary laws and consumption of consecrated food exemplify characteristics of the pagan holy man upon whom Julian models his priesthood. In the Letter to the Community of the Jews, Julian hints that he plans to restore Jewish priests to positions of leadership. The supreme standing of Jewish priests in a restored temple model Julian’s conception of ideal Hellenic leadership. Further, Jews offer Hellenes a model for the financing of priests, as Jewish priests receive the right shoulder of every sacrifice.

This concluding chapter covers the institutions, ideologies, techniques, and technologies that emerged during the early twentieth century from previous decades of color research. While some – such as Ladd-Franklin’s “development” theory – were abandoned; and others – such as Peirce’s Pragmatism and semiotic – flourished, all found their ways into new medical, governmental, commercial, and popular modes of understanding and working with color, and with perceiving human beings.

In Muiopotmos, Spenser's specific interest in The Nun's Priest's Tale lies somewhere between sustained allusion and incidental reminiscence. Just what had been said in the The Nun's Priest's Tale that the real hero of the poem is rhetoric, yet it is different type of rhetoric used for different reasons and with different effects. Spenser significantly varies Chaucer's conspicuous use of rhetoric in relation to the ideologically sensitive themes of fortune and free will. Even though Spenser varies Chaucer's use of rhetoric in his work, the The Nun's Priest's Tale illuminates the characteristic that makes his poem Renaissance when compared to Muiopotmos. The Nun's Priest's Tale also offers a world simultaneously comic and sober, cheerful despite its threat and, despite its pitfalls, it is wonderfully secure, while in Muiopotmos, Spenser leaves a different impression of a world living in hostility.

The literary theorist Anne-Marie Priest argues that if poststructural scholars of religion have pointed out the connections between Derridean deconstruction and negative theology, the affinities between feminist theories of sexual difference and negative theology have been less explored. By reading the early texts of philosopher Luce Irigaray on alterity and sexual difference, Priest claims apophatic practices at the heart of contemporary feminism of difference. She maintains that for those feminists who affirm sexual difference, woman-as-the-Other holds a place similar to that held by God for apophatic theologians. Irigaray sheds light on the “womanliness” of God, suggesting that God is both a model and an agent for the disruption of patriarchy and the creation of feminine subjectivity. For feminist theology, which is committed to the quest for the full humanity of women and to the end of their oppression within the Christian tradition, can anything sensible come out of this tradition of silence and unsaying? This chapter highlights some apophatic patterns within the field of feminist theology and considers the prospects of apophatic feminist theology.

This chapter focuses on Steampunk’s use of allohistorical tropes, including the reversal of hindsight bias and point of divergence tropes, to present a rhetoric of science and technology reflective of our contemporary cultural anxieties surrounding technological development. Steampunk’s historical point of divergence is, significantly, the golden period of technological enlightenment and discovery immediately preceding the wide adoption of environmentally destructive diesel and coal combustion engines, and before the experiments in atomic physics that followed them. Steampunk preserves a moment in technological history in which the destructive potential of science was still largely unrealized, when inventors were imagined to be journeyman tinkerers like Franklin or Da Vinci rather than scientists like Oppenheimer. In short, Steampunk presents a tinkerer’s rhetoric of inquiry using an imagined late 19th century as its vehicle. This perspective is critical of the close relationship between science and capitalism that developed during the Industrial Revolution, and given the emergence of Steampunk in the 1970s and 80s also contains echoes of the rise of modern environmentalism and Cold War nuclear paranoia. To develop these perspectives, this chapter analyzes two steampunk novels: Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker.

Discovery of a letter about “Harry’s” music “made” for a ball at Josias Priest’s Chelsea boarding school has reopened questions about the relationship of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to Priest’s establishment. As scholars have noted, the performance of Dido at Priest’s school was not unusual; other works, including Thomas Duffett’s Beauties Triumph (1676) and John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1684), were also performed at Chelsea. This essay both contextualizes these famous examples and moves beyond them, as I consider the interaction of pedagogical space with cultural product, mapping the geography of schoolgirl operatic performance in England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Boarding schools, designed to train young ladies in the so-called ornamental arts, often were located in repurposed manor houses (aligning the schools with money and privilege). Because of their proximity to urban centers, these institutions had access to or were actually run by a person with close ties to a professional musician, dancer, or other stage professional. The performances given at schools occupied an interstitial space, belonging neither to the public stage, nor being entirely private.

This chapter begins by revealing Cobb’s longtime struggle with anxiety, especially when at a crossroads in his life. He sought outlets for his talents not only to establish himself as a successful writer but also to earn a living. Cobb’s abilities led to praise from editors such as Bob Davis of Munsey’s Magazine. The chapter follows Cobb through his last two years at the Evening World and his decision to work full time for the Saturday Evening Post under the editorship of George Horace Lorimer. Meanwhile, Cobb continued to write for both the Post and other outlets, including his Judge Priest stories. This long-lasting series evoking an idyllic “southern” atmosphere turned out to be a gold mine for Cobb. Cobb’s southern Kentucky-based writing allowed his readers to see his perspective of the South. The chapter concludes with a trip to Europe and the work Cobb accomplished from the Continent.

After his jaunt to Europe and the exhausting months of his lecture tour, Cobb’s health declined. An emergency operation for a hernia left him recuperating for many weeks, delaying his planned return to Europe. During this time, Cobb published few pieces, but he soon turned his poor health into a triumph of humor. His article titled “Speaking of Operations” struck gold. By 1935, his book of the same name had sold more than a million copies. Cobb’s devotion to the Old South led to his return to southern-influenced writing. The themes of North-South reconciliation and small-town neighborliness suited his audience. Cobb also had ambitions of writing a long-running play and film adaptations of his stories. Cobb became an outspoken voice for “Americanism” and victory against Germany, as well as a prosperous man as he entered mid-life.

Cobb moved to Hollywood at the invitation of Will Rogers and Hal Roach. With Cobb’s work in the film business, his writing tapered off. His involvement in the filming of Judge Priest, starring Will Rogers, renewed Cobb’s belief in himself and his career. The film received excellent newspaper coverage when it was released in the fall of 1934, owing to Rogers’s celebrity. The rest of the chapter focuses on Cobb’s work and family life in Hollywood until his wealth and health began to decline.

In Chapter III contains an explication Garcia’s model of objects as differentiators between that which they comprehend and that which comprehends them. Garcia’s model is then contrasted with other canonical theories in the new continental metaphysics, showing how a defining feature is the manner in which metaphysicians can be interpreted as responding to an enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation. This allows the foregrounding of Garcia’s dialetheist paradoxico-metaphysics, and also one to see clearly how Garcia’s achievement should be interpreted alongside related meta-metaphysical developments by Graham Harman and Graham Priest, as well as other recent speculative philosophers such as Alain Badiou, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Livingston. In addition, it allows one to begin to appreciate the fact that Garcia is contributing to contemporary analytic metaphyics.

Stanley Brandes is an American sociocultural anthropologist whose work spans both European and Latin American peasantries. In this article Brandes describes a kind of Catholicism characteristic of peasant villages of the Iberian peninsula: locally inflected by rites and practices particular to specific regions, and organizationally overlapping with kinship and territorial corporate groups. At the broadest level, the essay offers a set of reflections about processes of modernization and secularization, viewed through a classic set of anthropological oppositions: collective/individual, rural/urban, great/little. More specifically, however, it tells us something interesting about the impact of Vatican II reforms on the ground. Brandes argues that what might be read as “secularization” is, in the village of Becedas, a function of processes internal to religion itself. Today, in light of works such as Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, this line of argument has become quite familiar. Yet as Brandes’s ethnography suggests, ruminations around the polemic between belief and unbelief have not merely been the preserve of scholars and philosophers; they have inflected the lives of ordinary Catholic peasants as well. Through Brandes we see how Becedas villagers narrate, in their own idiom, the development of the idea of “the secular” as something that is contingent upon the history of Christianity in the West. By exploring the disjuncture between Catholic “great and little” traditions Brandes touches on one of the most interesting pressure points within the anthropology of Catholicism: the division of labor between the clergy and the lay. Such a division may map with varying intensities onto other distinctions, such as those between elite and folk, or educated and uneducated, and even onto distinctly differing ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Whether or not clergy are perceived as “cultural outsiders” in the communities they serve, where a person stands within the institutional hierarchy matters. That is, Catholic subjectivities are incontrovertibly shaped by an individual’s relationship to or position in relation to the church. Belonging to the priesthood thus diminishes the possibilities for certain abstractions and sensorial trajectories, just as it makes others imminently actualizable. In the particular context being described here, the priest, Don Sixto, sees “folk Catholicism” a bit the way a radical Protestant sees Roman Catholicism: as a Christianity contaminated. His work is one of purification: separating true belief from “blind adherence to custom.” For parishioners, however, there is no a priori concept of a religion “contaminated.” There is only a corpus of devotions whose gradual elimination leaves a sense of spiritual vacuum. By foregrounding a “perspectival” approach split between the view of the priest, the people, and the anthropologist, Brandes allows us to grasp the structural tensions that propel different versions of what is correct and what is proper in Christian forms of practice. Brandes’s article might be read in some ways as a tentative exploration of the interesting and often fraught role Catholic priests perform in their day-to-day ministry as mediators between the center and the periphery, and old and new, in the great march of Christian modernity.