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Can a Shakespeare course effectively historicize and challenge Shakespeare’s deployment in U.S. educational contexts “as an instrument of white racial consolidation and non-white marginalization”? Demeter offers a concise summary of Shakespeare’s positioning as the pinnacle of “universal” white, Western cultural values before detailing a course that combines Richard III, Henry IV Part I, and Othello with responses to Shakespeare’s works by black artists such as James Baldwin, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Djanet Sears. Though he hoped that placing African-American literature and Shakespeare “on equal footing” would provoke critical interrogations of Shakespeare’s privileged place in the literary canon, Demeter finds Shakespeare’s whiteness and universality difficult myths to dismantle, and offers his ambivalent experience as a way to frame key questions about the relation between Shakespeare pedagogy and social justice.

This chapter begins by introducing semantic memory as an attractor neural network (ANN). This neural network ‘learns’ and ‘retrieves’ using essentially the Hebbian mechanism, and stores pieces of information as patterns of activation that complete themselves when only a part is externally excited (attractor states). This chapter first follows the line of research initiated by Hopfield in 1982, under the strong influence of developments that have occurred during the 1960s and 1970s in the modern statistical mechanics of fields concerning the so-called Universality of Collective Emergent Behaviours. Then, the author argues that the traditional amorphous, the fully interconnected Hopfield architecture, needs to be replaced by a modular structure for semantic memory. A neural network model is thus proposed in this chapter that aims to provide evidence about the function and dysfunction of semantic memory.

Just like any civilization, Europe produces knowledge, but it is distinguished from other civilizations by its unique mode of operation in knowledge production. Until recently, Europe was proud of itself in its commitment to theory or philosophy at large: it used to claim that it was the only portion of humanity capable of reflecting upon itself, of criticizing and transforming constituted its own manner of knowledge production. Europeans regarded themselves as an exceptional kind of humanity capable of theory and called themselves humanitas in contrast to other types of humanity, anthropos: those who produce knowledge but are incapable of reflecting upon and criticizing their modus operandi in knowledge production. However, the central topic in this article is not about the dichotomy of humanitas and anthropos, which still shapes the disciplinary configuration of human sciences, but rather what has been generally referred to as the crisis of European humanity. It is increasingly difficult to sustain this exceptionalist notion of the West or European humanity. Simultaneously, it is difficult to sustain its obverse and equally exceptionalist notion of Asian culturalism. Through the examination of the crisis of European humanity, this article discusses what the status of theory can potentially mean as we seek to interrogate the identity formations called the West and Asia.

Anna Julia Cooper condemns ideals of abstraction and universality within the traditions of U.S. Constitutionalism, Episcopalianism, and in the literature of leading establishment writers, including William Dean Howells. As articulated in Chapter 3, “‘Wondering under Which Head I Come’: Sounding Anna Julia Cooper’s Fin-de-Siècle Song,” an avowed embrace of difference, pluralism, and conflict characterizes Cooper’s prose, while her analyses of black male gender bias in the realm of higher education signal keen insights into the nuanced constraints of ostensibly liberal politics of the era. In A Voice From the South (1892), her reconceptualization of dominant tenets of civility and equality as “critical regard”; her invocation of musical metaphor; and her irruptions of sarcasm, compel a radical reevaluation of ways of recognizing social change. Cooper also extends an indictment of the provinciality and subtle maintenance of racial hierarchies within the (white) Women’s Movement which holds relevance today.

Chapter 11 considers the third major variant of objectivism, according to which meaning in life is constituted primarily by certain non-consequentialist considerations in the natural world. For example, it takes up the views of: Alan Gewirth, who suggests that meaningfulness is a matter of employing one’s reason from a universal standpoint; Neil Levy, who maintains that (great) meaning is constituted by open-ended activities; Joseph Mintoff, who contends that meaning is a function of being attached to transcendent (roughly, extensive) ends; Robert Nozick, who deems meaning to be connection with organic unity; and Quentin Smith, who argues that meaning inheres in developing theoretical and practical rationality. Sometimes the chapter argues that these principles are too broad, entailing that meaning inheres in conditions it intuitively does not, but more often it argues they are too narrow, unable to capture salient respects in which the good, the true and the beautiful are meaningful.

This chapter revisits my own notion of ethical feminism, through an engagement with the recent work of Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak. The central argument is that not only must we recognize that all universals are incomplete, and call for translation, but that the step to take seriously that other intellectual traditions are equal to Anglo-American and European schools of thought means that we may have to re-evaluate our own notions of freedom and equality. This re-evaluation is particularly important for transnational feminist alliances, if they are to truly be based in an egalitarian feminist politics that is not blocked by particularistic notions of the significance of Europe.

Analyzes the key concepts of universality and the transcendental in Peter Hallward's critique of postcolonial theory, Absolutely Postcolonial. Argues, following Nathan Brown, that his ‘transcendental deduction’ of human relationality must itself be historicized, rather than positing such human attributes as atemporal absolutes.

Music is universally a key part of life, with a diversity of styles and usage from love songs to warfare and religion. The variations are immense, and always changing. This introduction has a historical outline, with a rapid overview of early instruments and music. Music developed partly from a gradual relaxation of religious control of what was acceptable. The Renaissance in art and literature contributed, but they require language and knowledge of the symbolisms. Music has none of these restrictions, and our responses are totally personal. There has been a major role of scientific inputs into instruments, concert halls, distribution of music via printing and notation, plus the electronics of recorded music and broadcasting. These factors altered compositional styles. The following chapters will expand on these highly diverse and numerous scientific and technological features and their musical consequences.

Should we eat to live or live to eat? Philosophers in the Western traditions have generally argued for the former, dismissing gustatory taste, thus the pleasures of the table, as a second-tier sensation. This idea stems from both the Classical and Christian belief in the superiority of the mind over the body. Robert Valgenti argues that it was not until relatively recently that philosophers began to take food seriously, and that having a philosophy of food is indeed integral to living good life.

How can responsibility for the victimization of Muslims be located in a global arena where potentially everyone can be adjudged guilty? Its universality allows such responsibility to break down the distinction between political and other dimension of action, rendering indiscriminate the violence of victimization as well as that meant to avenge it. But rather than invoking some universal doctrine by which to judge responsibility, the globalization of militancy leads to the repudiation of any such criterion. Instead, everyone is to be judged by the faithfulness to self-professed principles, with those willing to suffer most in their name demonstrating the truth of these values.