Books on the topic 'Attitude toward subject matter'

The introduction seeks to locate the youngest children in the Roman family and discusses the newly emerging theme of Roman infancy. It outlines the ways in which the book aims to fill a lacuna on the subject of infancy and earliest childhood, isolating the age group of the under one-year-olds because of the very particular historical circumstances that affected this period in the life cycle and attitudes toward it. The introduction presents a methodology for integrating archaeological evidence, material culture, and the iconography of infancy with social and cultural history, an approach for which this subject matter is especially well suited.

The focus of this chapter is on Levantine Arabic attitude datives that take the subject of the construction in which they occur as a referent. The chapter analyzes specific instances of subject-oriented attitude datives as used in different types of social acts. It shows that when a speaker uses these datives in representatives (i.e., statements that may be assessed as true or false), she expresses an evaluative attitude toward an event as either unimportant/trivial or unexpected/surprising, based on her familiarity with the subject of that event and her expectations of that subject. When a speaker uses the same datives in directives (e.g., requests), she evaluates the potential cost of the action required by her utterance as minimal compared to any potential gain. All social functions are contingent on contextual factors, including the sociocultural, situational, and co-textual context.

Recent forms of expressivism attempt to explain the sense in which certain propositions are ‘non-factual’ in terms of principles about attitudes towards those propositions. Following recent expressivist accounts of conditionals and modals, a version of expressivism about vagueness is explored, which maintains that to have a credence in a vague proposition is just to have your credences in the precise propositions distributed in a certain way. Whilst this form of expressivism is ultimately rejected, a consequence of the view can be exploited to partially capture the intuition that certain subject matters are non-factual. This principle, Rational Supervenience’, effectively states that all disagreements about the vague ultimately boil down to disagreements about the precise: any two rational priors that agree about all precise propositions agree about everything. While the Principle of Plenitude states that there is a proposition occupying every evidential role, Rational Supervenience entails conversely that every proposition occupies some evidential role.

The book is a comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood in a cultural overview encompassing the entirety of the Roman Empire. It brings together some of the most recent discoveries and presents a fresh perspective on archaeological, historical, and social debates. Despite the developing emphasis in current scholarship on children in Roman culture, there has been little research on the role and significance of the youngest children in the family and society. Because of the very particular historical circumstances that affected the beginning of the life cycle of a Roman child, the book isolates the age group of the under one-year-olds to explore their lives as well as Roman attitudes towards the young and the perception of personhood. It integrates social and cultural history with archaeological evidence, funerary remains, material culture, and the iconography of infancy, an approach for which this subject matter is especially well suited. An examination of the many and varied strands of evidence enables us to contextualize the rhetoric about earliest childhood in Roman texts. The volume refutes the notion that high infant mortality conditioned Roman parents not to engage in the early life of their children or to view them, or their deaths, with indifference, and it concludes that even within the first weeks and months of life Roman children were invested with social and gendered identities.

‘Every generation re-writes history in its own way’. Re-writing History applies Collingwood’s dictum to a series of topics and themes, some of which have been central to prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology for the past century or more, while some have been triggered by more recent changes in technology or social attitudes. Some issues are highly controversial, like the proposals for the Stonehenge World Heritage sites. Others challenge long-held popular myths, like the deconstruction of the Celts and by extension the Picts. Yet some traditional tenets of scholarship have gone unchallenged for too long, like the classical definition of civilization itself. But why should it matter? Surely it is in the order of things that each generation rejects received wisdom and adopts ideas that are radical or might offend previous generations? Is this not simply symptomatic of healthy and vibrant debate? Or are there grounds for believing that current changes are of a more disquieting character, denying the basic assumptions of rational argument and freedom of enquiry and expression that have been the foundation of western scholarship since the eighteenth century Enlightenment? Re-writing History addresses contemporary concerns about information and its interpretation, including issues of misinformation and airbrushing of politically-incorrect history. Its subject matter is the archaeology of prehistoric and early historic Britain, and the changes witnessed over two centuries and more in the interpretation of the archaeological heritage by changes in the prevailing political and social as well as intellectual climate. Far from being topics of concern only to academics in ivory towers, the way in which seemingly innocuous issues such as cultural diffusion or social reconstruction in the remote past are studied and presented reflects important shifts in contemporary thinking that challenge long-accepted conventions of free speech and debate.

TOWARDS THE NEW LIFE Theology and Importance of Christian Initiation for the Life of Faith The book is in equal parts a presentation and an invitation. The subject matter of both is the mystagogical initiation leading to the personal encounter with God and eventually to the union within the Church in Christ, which happens initially and particualry in the sacramental liturgy. Mystagogy was the essential experience of life in the early Church and now is being so intensely discussed and postulated by the ecclesial Magisterium and through the teaching of the recent popes and synods. Within the ten chapters of this book the reader proceeds through the aspects strictly associated with Christian initiation, noticeable in catechumenate and suggestive for further Christian life. It is not surprising then, that the study begins with answering the question about the sense of dealing with catechumenate at all. The response developed in the first chapter covers four key points: the contemporary state of our faith, the need for dialogue in evangelization, the importance of liturgy in the renewal of faith and the obvious requirement of follo- wing the Church’s Magisterium, quite explicit in the subject undertaken within this book. The introductory chapter is meant to evoke interest in catechumenate as such and encourage comprehension of its essence, in order to keep it in mind while planning contemporary evangelization. For doing this with success and avoiding pastoral archeology, we need a competent insight into the main message and goal of Christian initiation. Catechumenate is the first and most venerable model of formation and growth in faith and therefore worth knowing. The second chapter tries to cope with the reasons and ways of the present return to the sources of catechumenate with respect to Christian initiation understood to be the building of the relationship with God. The example of catechumenate helps us to discover, how to learn wisely from the history. This would definitely mean to keep the structure and liturgy of catechumenate as a vehicle of God’s message, which must be interpreted and adapted always anew and with careful and intelligent consideration of the historical flavour on particular stages within the history of salvation and cultural conditions of the recipients. For that reason we refer to the Biblical resources and to the historical examples of catechumenate including its flourishing and declining periods, after which we are slowly approaching the present reinterpretation of the catechumenal process enhanced by the official teaching of the Church. As the result of the latter, particularly owing to the Vatican Council II, we are now dealing with the renewed liturgy of baptism displayed in two liturgical books: The Rite of Baptism for Children and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). This version for adults is the subjectmatter of the whole chapter, in which a reader can find theological analyses of the particular rites as well as numerous indications for improving one’s life with Christ in the Church. You can find interesting associations among the rites of initiation themselves and astounding coherence between those rites and the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and other sacraments, which simply means the ordinary life of faith. Deep and convincing theology of the process of initiation proves the inspiring spiritual power of the initial and constitutive sacraments of baptism and confirmation, which may seem attractive not only for catechumens but also for the faithful baptized in their infancy, and even more, since they might have not yet had a chance to see what a plausible treasure they have been conveying in their baptismal personality. How much challenge for further and constant realization in life may offer these introductory events of Christian initiation, yet not sufficiently appreciated by those who have already been baptized and confirmed! We all should submit to permanent re-evangelization according to this primary pattern, which always remains essential and fundamental. Very typical and very post-conciliar approach to Christian formation appears in the communal dimension, which guards and guarantees the ecclesial profile of initiation and prepares a person to be a living member of the Church. The sixth chapter of the book is dealing with ecclesial issues in liturgy. They refer to comprehending the word of God, especially in the context of liturgy, which brings about a peculiar theological sense to it and giving a special character to proclaiming the Gospel, which the Pope Francis calls “liturgical proclamation”. The ecclesial premises influence the responsibility for the fact of accompanying the candidates, who aim at becoming Christ’s disciples. As the Church is teaching also in the theological and pastoral introduction to the RCIA, this is the duty of all Christians, which means: priests, religious and the lay, because the Church is one organism in whose womb the new members are conceived and raised. As this fact is strongly claimed by the Church the method of initiation arises to great importance. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the catechumenal method stemming from Christ’s pedagogy and His mystery of Incarnation introducing a very important issue of implementing the Divine into the human. The chapter concerning this method opens a more practical part of the book. The crucial message of it is to make mystagogy a natural and obvious method which is the way of building bonds with Christ in the community of the people who already have these bonds and who are eager to tighten them and are aware of the beauty and necessity of closeness with Christ. Christian initiation is the process of entering the Kingdom of God and meeting Christ up to the union with Him – not so much learning dogmas and moral requirements. This is a special time when candidates-catechumens-elected mature in love and in their attitude to Christ and people, which results in prayer and new way of life. As in the past catechumenate nowadays inspires the faithful in their imagination of love and mercy as well as reminds us about various important details of the paschal way of life, which constitute our baptismal vocation, but may be forgotten and now with the help of catechumenate can be recognized anew, while accompanying adults on their catechumenal way. The book is meant for those who are already involved in catechumenal process and are responsible for the rites and formation as well as for those who are interested in what the Church is offering to all who consciously decide to know and follow Christ. You can learn from this book, what is the nature and specificity of the method suggested by the Rite itself for guiding people to God the Saviour and to the community of His people. The aim of the study is to present the universal way of evangelization, which was suggested and revealed by God in His pedagogy, particularly through Jesus Christ and smoothly adopted by the early Church. This way, which can be called a method, is so complete, substantial and clear that it deserves rediscovery, description and promotion, which has already started in the Church’s teaching by making direct references to such categories as: initiation, catechumenate, liturgical formation, the rereading the Mystery of Christ, the living participation in the Mystery and faith nourished by the Mystery. The most engaging point with Christian initiation is the fact, that this seems to be the most effective way of reviving the parish, taking place on the solid and safe ground of liturgy with the most convincing and objective fact that is our baptism and our new identity born in baptismal regenerating bath. On the grounds of our personal relationship with God and our Christian vocation we can become active apostles of Christ. Evangelization begins with ourselves and in our hearts. Thinking about the Church’s mission, we should have in mind our personal mission within the Church and we should refer to it’s roots – first to our immersion into Christ’s death and resurrection and to the anointment with the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit we have all been sent to follow Christ wherever He goes, not necessarily where we would like to direct our steps, but He would. Let us cling to Him and follow Him! Together with the constantly transforming and growing Church! Towards the new life!

Chapter 8 investigates the interpretation of embedded pragmatic scalar modifiers and considers the semantic mechanism behind subject- and speaker-oriented interpretations of embedded pragmatic scalar modifiers and CIs. For a subject-oriented reading, it is argued that there is a shift from a CI to a secondary at-issue entailment at the clausal level when the embedded clause combines with an attitude predicate and has a subject-oriented reading. For a speaker-oriented reading of embedded pragmatic scalar modifiers, it is claimed that the lower-level pragmatic scalar modifiers have the distinctive property of projection: unlike higher-level pragmatic scalar modifiers/typical CIs, lower-level pragmatic scalar modifiers can project out of the complement of a belief predicate only if there is a speaker-oriented modal in the main clause. This chapter shows that the interpretation of embedded pragmatic scalar modifiers is not only a matter of context and involves semantic and pragmatic mechanisms.

Thucydides was very popular among Roman rhetoricians and historians of the first century bce. The Greek critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, however, criticizes Thucydides for his unnatural style and his inappropriate treatment of subject matter. This chapter explains Dionysius’ criticisms by taking into account the later writer’s rhetorical perspective on the writing of history, as well as the character of his Roman audience, which included the addressee of the treatise, the historian Quintus Aelius Tubero. Dionysius’ criticisms of Thucydides’ anti-Athenian attitude ( Letter to Pompeius 3.15), and his apparently conflicting praise (On Thucydides 8.1) of Thucydides’ commitment to the truth can be reconciled if we take into account Dionysius’ concept of “truth,” his intended audience, and his rhetorical concept of historiography.

During the Renaissance, erotic love emerged as a favorite theme of Italian intellectuals. From the Neoplatonic treatises of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, to the works of Petrarch and Dante, the paintings of Botticelli and Raphael, thetrattati d’amore(treatises of love) by Pietro Bembo and Leone Ebreo, the learned commentaries on the sonnets of Michelangelo and Lorenzo de Medici, or the medical writings on lovesickness, Italy’s obsession with the subject of love was evident. Italian poets such as Dante were particularly preoccupied with the female beloved, whom they typically idealized as a kind of angelic lady (donna angelicata), a heavenly character, rather than an object of sensual appetite and affection. Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch’s sonnets, includingRime Sparse, by stripping from them one of their most fundamental features: the idea that erotic love could transcend the beloved’s death. This article examines Wyatt’s erotic poetry, how his Protestantism influenced his translations of Petrarchan lyrics, and his attitude toward Neoplatonism.

This chapter examines the little magazines' shift to a poetry of modern life between 1910 and 1925 by discarding long-standing generic strictures of style and subject matter in favor of themes dealing with the industrialized metropolis. Soon after 1910, many poets such as T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, and Carl Sandburg began to write verses about life in the modern city. This turn toward urban subject matter marked a decisive change in American poetry's relationship to modernity and an epochal departure from national traditions. This chapter considers the integral connection between verse and the visual arts as many American poets focused on investigating urban modernity as a subject. It also discusses the different ways that these poets learned to represent the machine-age metropolis after 1910 and challenged the aesthetic and ideological verities of class, ethnicity, and gender underlying their romantic-genteel inheritance; acts of observation in American cityscape verse that operate at both microscopic and panoramic levels; and poems of gutters, street pavements, and skylines that are complementary within an emerging poetics of urban materiality.

This chapter traces Freud’s interest in yet apparent aversion to phobia, from his earliest writings on the topic in the 1890s through to his reinterpretation of the 1909 Little Hans case study in the 1920s. Here, it is possible to detect something like a phobic reaction to phobia itself: what might be called Freud’s phobophobia. It is also be possible to find, in the subsequent literature on the case of Little Hans, traces of this phobic reaction contaminating sometimes sharply critical readings: in Deleuze’s markedly hostile attitude to this Freudian text, we find an aversion to what is in fact most ‘phobic’ about it. Through exploring the Lacanian idea that phobia prevents the onset of psychosis in the event of a certain lapse of the paternal metaphor, phobia seems to operate precisely through a certain resistance to itself, a doubleness that renders Freud’s phobophobia not just a psychological curiosity but perhaps a feature of the very structure of phobia from the outset. Psychoanalytic approaches to phobia with are contrasted with other ways to think about its subject-matter, notably in the writings of Blanchot and Lyotard.

Consciousness, understood as an awareness of what is going on that helps shape one’s experiences, is one of the ways that scholars have distinguished animal life from the rest of the natural world. Beings that have interests in having good experiences and avoiding bad ones deserve our moral attention, and this quality is an important feature of ethical engagement with other sentient beings, both human and nonhuman. What interests matter and why they matter is a subject of disagreement that has affected what we judge to be permissible or impermissible treatment of other animals. Empathy toward and respect for other animals takes us beyond attention to their suffering and has us focus on what counts as well-being for others, by their own lights.

Rhetoric as a whole fragmented during the medieval era, as did the conversational constellation in particular, not fully to cohere again until the humanist reintegration of the Renaissance. Yet the humanist recuperation did not restore an unchanged rhetoric. On the one hand, the concepts of friendship, familiarity, and conversatio had reoriented themselves around the universalizing Christian conception of community during rhetoric’s long medieval rupture, while the sermo of dialogue had begun to concern itself with that eminently Christian subject matter, the interiority of the soul. On the other hand, the ars dictaminis had shifted the medieval letter toward the public realm, and thus toward the traditional realm of oratory. Petrarch’s rediscovery of classical conversation retained these medieval innovations. The Renaissance variant of conversation that sprang from him would partly slough the theory and practice of its medieval predecessor—but the influence of Christianity and the ars dictaminis would endure.

This chapter examines the paintings of John Frederick Peto, whose “letter rack” depictions constitute melancholic acts of remembering transacted through the arrangement of abandoned objects. Insofar as Peto theorizes memory through the genre of trompe l’oeil, he provokes questions concerning the extent to which recollection entails fabrication, and focused upon the insistence that such fabrication invariably turns upon sensations of loss. As Peto’s letter racks move toward subject matter relating to the Civil War, his questions come increasingly to involve embroilments of memory and memorialization, and in ways that offer an entrée into Emerson’s “Fortune of the Republic,” an essay that anticipates future acts of remembering undertaken by other generations of Americans confronted with the challenge of recalling the War with integrity.

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor is the first book-length study of O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence and is the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of her thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and wrote in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the U.S.: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” This double-mindedness also manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, this study analyzes the ways in which O’Connor critiques the unjust racial practices of the South in her stories and other writings yet unconsciously upholds them; explores O’Connor’s ambivalence with regard to contemporary politics; considers the influence of theology and the Catholic Church on O’Connor’s attitudes; examines the complex role played by “Africanist” presence in the construction of white consciousness in O’Connor’s stories; and explores the theme of thwarted communion between the races in her fiction and correspondence. The study concludes that O’Connor’s race-haunted writing serves as the literary incarnation of her uncertainty about the great question of her era and of her urgent need, despite considerable reluctance, to address the fraught relationship between the races.

Philosophy of Medicine seeks to answer two questions: (1) what is medicine? and (2) what should we think of it? The first question is motivated by the observation that medicine has existed and continues to exist in many different forms in different times and places. There is no activity or belief that is common to all medical traditions in all times and places. What, if anything, makes us count these activities as varieties of the same thing—namely, medicine? The book distinguishes the goal and business of medicine, arguing that the goal is cure, while the business of medicine cannot be, because medical traditions have been too hit-and-miss at achieving cure. The core medical competence is identified as engaging with the project of understanding the nature and causes of disease. A model of health is also required to say what medicine is, since health is part of its subject matter, and a novel theory of health as a secondary property is offered. In the second part of the book, the proper epistemic attitude to medicine is considered. Contrary to much contemporary work, the book argues against positions setting very rigid constraints on what counts as admissible evidence in forming beliefs either about whole traditions or about specific interventions. Thus both Evidence-Based Medicine and Medical Nihilism are rejected. Instead a view called Medical Cosmopolitanism is developed from Appiah’s corresponding work in ethics. The view is applied to alternative and non-Mainstream traditions, as well as to the project of decolonizing medicine.

The first inclusive collection to examine post-2008 developments in Balkan cinema, this book brings together a number of international scholars working within and beyond the region to explore its industrial contexts and textual dimensions. Exploring both mainstream and arthouse cinemas, the authors identify patterns, trends and common characteristics in the subject matter and aesthetics of films produced and distributed since the global economic crisis. With a focus on transnational links, global networks and cross-cultural exchanges, the book addresses the role of national and supranational institutions as well as film festival networks in supporting film production, distribution and reception. Through critical and comprehensive profiles of the cinematic output in each Balkan country, and with an equal focus on smaller and underrepresented cinemas from Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Albania, the collection argues for the continuing relevance of the concept of ‘Balkan cinema’. This study conceptualizes Contemporary Balkan Cinema as a hybrid, trans-national encounter that offers multifarious responses to political and social challenges in the region: gravitation and/or disillusionment toward the European Union; migration; political and social instability; and economic recession.

The matter of money touches the writer's life at every point:in the need to make ends meet, in daily dealings with agents, editors, and publishers, and in the choice of subject matter and the lineaments of the imagined world.William Faulkner was no exception.The people and communities he wrote about were deeply entangled in personal, local, regional, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as was the author himself, whose economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century.This collection brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel laureate and new questions about his art.Essays address economies of debt and gift-giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.The Faulkner we meet in these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

The law of sports wagering in the United States reflects the exceptionalism of sports. Although limitations on gambling in general have undergone significant liberalization in recent decades, sports wagering remains subject to a complex interplay among federal and state prohibitions. This exceptionalism stems from the notion that sports contests would be ineluctably corrupted by betting, potentially giving contestants unduly large investments in the outcome, or in shaping the magnitude of the victory. Despite this continuing antipathy toward sports betting as a matter of formal legality, recent legal developments have unwittingly created a burgeoning industry in sports betting, which industry has created significant instability in the general prohibition. Specifically, the rise of daily fantasy sports contests, which can feature contests that appear remarkably similar to single-game bets on the outcome of a game, has both evidenced the domestic appetite for sports wagering, and has pushed against the boundaries set by the anti-gambling prohibitions. The legality of daily fantasy sports is highly debatable, and calls into question the very nature of a sports bet as a game of chance or skill, and whether or not fantasy play presents a substantially different set of characteristics. Whatever the legal outcome, strong arguments exist that suggest that fantasy play would not give rise to the concerns that animated the general prohibition on sports wagering.