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The Sherwin Cody Legacy

Edwin L. Battistella

in Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody's Famous Language School

Chapter 16 takes stock of Sherwin Cody as an entrepreneur, social critic, and educator, framing his legacy as silent mentor who encourage people to take responsibility for their own education through ... More

Chapter 16 takes stock of Sherwin Cody as an entrepreneur, social critic, and educator, framing his legacy as silent mentor who encourage people to take responsibility for their own education through on‐going study and reading.Less

The Senses, Reason and the Imagination

P. J. E. Kail

in Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy

This chapter compares three key aspects of Hume's account of mind, sense reason, and imagination. Explanatory projection rests with a contrast with detective sources, and it is argued that the senses ... More

This chapter compares three key aspects of Hume's account of mind, sense reason, and imagination. Explanatory projection rests with a contrast with detective sources, and it is argued that the senses constitute a detective source of content and reason of belief. This is a discussion of Hume's alleged scepticism about probable reason and the historical background to Hume's account of the imagination.Less

Every Day People Judge You

Edwin L. Battistella

in Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody's Famous Language School

Chapter Eight begins a survey of other popular self‐improvements products that drew on the same advertising themes and social anxieties as Cody's course.

What’s in a Comma?

Christopher Prendergast

in Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

This chapter examines a question, the most important of the skeptic's questions, not only in but for Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: is poetic seeing also true seeing, and how can it ... More

This chapter examines a question, the most important of the skeptic's questions, not only in but for Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: is poetic seeing also true seeing, and how can it be if poetic seeing is the seeing of a mirage? It analyzes Proust's use of comma in the sentence “those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of.” It also considers Proust's identification of Elstir's way of seeing as based on an “optical illusion” or a “mirage” and looks at signs of a mercurial and probing intelligence that are to be found almost everywhere at work in the Recherche. Finally, the chapter describes the sparring contest of intellect and impression that it argues runs deeper into a question of “truth.”Less

Persian Conquerors, Babylonian Captivators

Erica Ehrenberg

in Regime Change in the Ancient Near East and Egypt: From Sargon of Agade to Saddam Hussein

This chapter examines the impact of the relation between the Persian conquerors and the local Babylonians on the cultural continuity in Babylonia during the mid-first millennium BCE. It suggests that ... More

This chapter examines the impact of the relation between the Persian conquerors and the local Babylonians on the cultural continuity in Babylonia during the mid-first millennium BCE. It suggests that the evidence of Persian adoption of Babylonian traditions is manifest not only in administrative and social systems, but also in the visual arts and iconography. The analysis of corpora of seal impressions from Babylonian and Achaemenid archives reveal a complex and slowly evolving relationship between the two traditions, reflecting, but not temporally correlative with, political developments.Less

Risking Life and Limb

Mark R. Leary

in The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life

Many of the risks that people take with their safety and health can be traced to the self. In particular, the desire to be perceived in particular ways by others often promotes risk-taking, leading ... More

Many of the risks that people take with their safety and health can be traced to the self. In particular, the desire to be perceived in particular ways by others often promotes risk-taking, leading people to do things that are dangerous to themselves or others. When people drive dangerously, show off with dangerous stunts, or succumb to peer pressure to engage in risky behaviors, they are often engaging in impression management (or self-presentation), trying to convey a particular impression of themselves to others. Similarly, when people engage in excessive suntanning, fail to practice safe sex, or drastically undereat (as in the case of anorexia), their concerns about how they appear to others may result in disease or death. Furthermore, self-reflection is often so aversive that people seek ways to escape it, engaging not only in relatively harmless escapism (such as napping, TV watching, and shopping) but in more extreme and detrimental forms of escape (including alcohol and drug use, masochism, and suicide). None of the dangerous and maladaptive behaviors examined in this chapter would be possible without the self.Less

Auto/biografiction: Counterfeit Lives: A Taxonomy of Displacements of Fiction towards Life‐Writing

Max Saunders

in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ... More

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less

Hume's Elements

Henry E. Allison

in Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise

This chapter examines Hume's thesis that perceptions, which is his generic term for mental contents, must be divided into two species: impressions and ideas. The basic issue posed by this division is ... More

This chapter examines Hume's thesis that perceptions, which is his generic term for mental contents, must be divided into two species: impressions and ideas. The basic issue posed by this division is that, while on the one hand Hume seems to treat this as a distinction in kind, comparing it with the contrast between feeling and thinking; on the other hand, he insists that impressions and ideas share the same content, differing only in quantitative features such as force and vivacity. And since Hume thinks it obvious that impressions always precede in time their corresponding ideas, he affirms the so-called ‘Copy Principle’, which he regards as the first principle of his philosophy and uses as a tool for rejecting traditional metaphysical terms such as ‘substance’. In addition to analyzing this distinction, the chapter provides a discussion of Hume's closely related theory of abstract ideas.Less

Belief and Knowledge

Tad Brennan

in The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate

This chapter examines the Stoics’ views on belief and knowledge. Stoics define belief as an assent of an impression. There are different kinds of beliefs; the most important ones follow from the fact ... More

This chapter examines the Stoics’ views on belief and knowledge. Stoics define belief as an assent of an impression. There are different kinds of beliefs; the most important ones follow from the fact that there are different kinds of assent, and different kinds of impressions to assent to. Stoics identify a special class impressions — called kataleptic impressions — that have a certain sort of vivid clarity, fidelity, and reliability. A kataleptic impression is one that comes from what is, is stamped and sealed and moulded in accordance with what is, and is of such as sort that it could not come from what is not. Knowledge is defined as a strong assent to a kataleptic impression.Less

The Rentier Aesthetics of Henry James

Andrew Lawson

in Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism

This chapter shows how James lacked a secure social position within the Northeastern bourgeoisie because his rentier father effectively spent his inheritance, forcing him carve out a career as a ... More

This chapter shows how James lacked a secure social position within the Northeastern bourgeoisie because his rentier father effectively spent his inheritance, forcing him carve out a career as a writer in the mass market. It shows how James was obsessed with preserving the relatively small hoard of capital jealously supervised by his parents, going on to explore the imprint of class and economics on James’s evolving realist aesthetic, through readings of the early magazine stories and the novels Roderick Hudson (1875) and Washington Square (1881). In these texts, a realist drive to anchor an inchoate and continually dissolving reality in sharp mimetic particulars is matched by an anxious hoarding of Paterian “impressions,” which are consistently imaged in financial terms.Less

Theory and Practice of Sensual Reading

Adam Watt

in Reading in Proust's A la recherche: 'le délire de la lecture'

This chapter focuses on the pivotal scene in the library in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 445–96), examining the narrator's concerns with sensation, the impression, and the problematic interactions of the ... More

This chapter focuses on the pivotal scene in the library in Le Temps retrouvé (IV, 445–96), examining the narrator's concerns with sensation, the impression, and the problematic interactions of the intellect and the senses—concerns which also reflexively involve Proust's readers. Many of the preoccupations and motifs studied in earlier chapters re-emerge as the narrator takes stock of how he has arrived at this point. Emphasis is placed on how reading has primed narrator and readers alike for a more profound engagement with the self and a richer sensual apprehension of the material world. Reading is a process of creative translation, integral to the production of the narrator's future work of art and to our own self-understanding. Lastly, the chapter assesses how the narrator's reading of his acquaintances at the ‘Bal de têtes’ provides a final link between the worldly and the aesthetic.Less

The notion of enargeia in Hellenistic philosophy 1

Katerina Ierodiakonou

in Episteme, etc.: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Barnes

This paper sketches the development of the notion of enargeia from a term of ordinary language to a technical term in ancient epistemology, and in particular the shift that takes place in the ... More

This paper sketches the development of the notion of enargeia from a term of ordinary language to a technical term in ancient epistemology, and in particular the shift that takes place in the understanding of this notion in Hellenistic philosophy. According to the Epicureans and the Stoics, enargeia is not a matter of subjective feeling nor conviction; it rather describes a feature of certain impressions, which by their nature are infallibly indicative of a fact about the world. Evident impressions, therefore, are reliable criteria of truth which allow us to distinguish truth from falsehood, and to safeguard the possibility of knowledge. Moreover, the Stoics go beyond the Epicureans in assuming that the enargeia of impressions is reflected by a distinctive intrinsic character of those impressions which are objectively evident. The Sceptics, on the other hand, try to show that there are no evident impressions in the sense in which the Epicureans and the Stoics suggest. Nevertheless, they do not dispense with the notion of enargeia altogether; they introduce a subjective notion of enargeia which does not guarantee truth but is restricted to what appears to be true and is convincing.Less

Identity 2.0: Young People and Digital and Mobile Media

Lynn Schofield Clark

in The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age

In this chapter, we learn more about how young people experience parental approaches to digital and mobile media. As they get older, young people increasingly desire respect and connection from their ... More

In this chapter, we learn more about how young people experience parental approaches to digital and mobile media. As they get older, young people increasingly desire respect and connection from their peers, and they seek these through self-expression that's enabled with digital and mobile media. Young people need to learn how much to reveal about themselves online in order to seem accessible, and how much to withhold so as not to come across as needy and insecure. They need to figure out how to reveal something of themselves so that others they care about will recognize and acknowledge them, while also discovering how much to rely on popular culture to define themselves; and, finally, they need to figure out how to present themselves as engaged in certain pursuits, like gaming or academics, without alienating themselves from peer cultures that do not offer support for such practices.Less

Realism and Truth

Paul Horwich

in From a Deflationary Point of View

This essay argues that the problems of truth and realism are independent of one another. Impressions to the contrary stem from the fact that realist and anti-realist positions must be formulated with ... More

This essay argues that the problems of truth and realism are independent of one another. Impressions to the contrary stem from the fact that realist and anti-realist positions must be formulated with the notion of truth. However, such formulations merely confirm the epistemologically and metaphysically neutral, deflationary theory, since they rest on the generalising function of the truth-predicare.Less

Impressions

Jerry A. Fodor

in Hume Variations

Hume thinks that there are two kinds of mental particulars, ‘impressions’ (roughly = sensations) and ‘ideas’ (roughly = concepts). This sensation/concept distinction does a lot of work for Hume. It ... More

Hume thinks that there are two kinds of mental particulars, ‘impressions’ (roughly = sensations) and ‘ideas’ (roughly = concepts). This sensation/concept distinction does a lot of work for Hume. It both explicates and underwrites his empiricism. Hume holds that simple ideas come from impressions, and that complex ideas reduce without residue to the simple ones that are their constituents. The claim that the concept/impression distinction is exhaustive thus implies that there is nothing at all in the (cognitive) mind except sensations and what is ‘derived’ from them. The empiricist consequences of these assumptions for both epistemology and semantics have, of course, been widely remarked; not least by Hume himself. This chapter focuses on how the derivation of concepts from impressions is supposed to work. All concepts have contents; complex concepts also have structures. So Hume needs a story about what the structure and content of concepts consists in, and about where the structure and content of concepts comes from. In particular, he needs a story about how they could be ‘copied’ from the structure and content of impressions.Less