Center for Humanities Newsletter.Spring 09

NEWSLETTER The Center for the Humanities A MEMBER OF THE CONSORTIUM OF HUMANITIES CENTERS AND INSTITUTES AUTZEN HOUSE OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY SPRING 2009 Passion for poetry & stars drove Research Fellows ‘Dante’s Astronomer’ named for 2009-10 n 1910, an amateur astronomer The Center has awarded seven Isat on a hill in southern India Research Fellowships for 2009-10, staring at the daylight moon as she all to faculty from OSU. No Visiting grappled with apparent mistakes in Fellowships are being offered for a published text. next year, but that program will The astronomer was Mary resume when the economy rallies Ackworth Evershed. The text was and endowment earnings are Dante’s Divine Comedy. healthy again. “The Ptolemaic structure on OSU Fellows receive one term which Dante based his universe had of support to be relieved of teaching long been discredited, but that and other responsibilities, though wasn’t the sort of error that they are considered in residence for absorbed her,” said Tracy the full academic year. They are Daugherty, Center Research Fellow provided a comfortable office in and professor of English at OSU. Tracy Daugherty Autzen House, along with a “She wanted to know if Dante was computer and support services. Tracy Daugherty accurate within his conception.” The call for applications for 2010- Was he, as some would claim, studies as well as to the 11 Fellowships will go out next fall. “unintelligible”? Or was he, for a understanding of sunspots and solar Following are the new Fellows man of his time and place, as flares. Evershed is the author of and their research project titles. insightful as one could be about the Dante and the Early Astronomers, sky? “the finest book ever written on Daugherty is working on the first Dante’s science.” Evan Gottlieb biography of Evershed, who made Dante’s Astronomer will be English Department important contributions to Dante Daugherty’s second biography. His The Global Gothic: Tolerance, first, Hiding Man: A Life of Aversion, and Cosmopolitanism in Donald Barthelme, was published Ann Radcliffe and her by St. Martin’s Press in February. Contemporaries He also is the author of numerous novels, short stories, and essays. Janet Lee In Evershed’s time, British Women Studies Program women wishing to become pro- Fallen Among Reformers: Miles fessional astronomers faced Franklin in Chicago, 1906-1915 several barriers. Astronomy was not taught as a stand-alone Hua-Yu Li Continued on page 11 Continued on page 8 Pragmatism with Schiller more honest & useful Man is the measure of all things: World War II, and led pragmatists of things which are, that they themselves to reject and downplay are, and of things which are not, Schiller’s influence.” that they are not. Protagoras, As pragmatism fell on hard times ca. 490– 420 BC during the 1940s and 1950s, Schiller’s reputation also sank, and Pragmatism: an American even when it was resurrected movement in philosophy founded several decades later, his contri- by C. S. Peirce and William butions were relegated to a James and marked by the footnote. doctrines that the meaning of Schiller’s pragmatism was of a conceptions is to be sought in very specific sort, said Porrovecchio. their practical bearings, that the His humanism traces back to function of thought is to guide James’s “subjective-centered action, and that truth is handling of the objective world,” and preeminently to be tested by the points toward what James called practical consequences of belief. Mark Porrovecchio “radical empiricism,” that is, to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary role individuals play in compre- hending and interpreting the world n the mid-1890s, F.C.S. Schiller Porrovecchio is working on what as they conceive it. Ifailed his doctoral orals at Cornell he describes as a rhetorical “Having sided with pragmatism, University and returned to England biography and intellectual history of and then with the more expansive to take a position at Oxford. Within Schiller (1864-1937), the foremost Continued on page 6 a year, William James published proponent of pragmatism at the turn F.C.S. Schiller several books of philosophy that set of the century. “This project off a blaze of debate between the analyzes, in chronological order, the defenders of Absolute Idealism and most substantial and often advocates of the new, ethical contested arguments that Schiller “practicalism.” engaged in so as to promote, first, The two men had begun a Jamesian pragmatism and, secondly, relationship while Schiller was at his own pragmatic humanism,” Cornell and James at Harvard, Porrovecchio wrote in his research carrying on a correspondence that proposal. would be of enduring value to both As an early defender of philosophers. pragmatism, Schiller’s style of “By the time pragmatism was argument—repeating key themes, introduced to the British engaging in vigorous and often philosophical public in 1900, Schiller humorous polemic—was crucial. was already well on his way to “Without it, pragmatism arguably articulating and defending might not have gained the foothold pragmatism to his peers,” said it did against the idealistic strains of Mark Porrovecchio, a Center philosophy dominant at the time. Research Fellow, forensics But that same bold, insistent style director, and assistant professor of proved an irritant to pragmatism’s speech communication at OSU. reputation in the years preceding 2 Mohist nonviolence requires ‘letting go of self’ Warring States Period, opposing he most important text of regions fought ferociously for TMohism, the Mozi, represents control of China. In response, Mozi mainly Mozi’s conversations and and his followers “made their mark lectures, though some scholars on ancient Chinese history for their speculate that Confucian and Daoist commitment to nonviolence in writings are included. In aiming to general and their endeavors to stop achieve “unbound identity,” the aggressive wars in particular.” Mohists emphasized several key An important principle of Mohism themes: commitment to the strictly is the injunction that regard for the disciplined cause itself; under- welfare of others ought to spring standing of and cooperation with from a spirit of “impartial concern” societal segments that did not that does not make distinctions conform to Mohist rules; active between self and other—associates communication with and even and strangers—a doctrine often service to “the Establishment,” described simplistically as “universal which often could not be won over Hung-yok Ip love.” by ideological argument alone. Despite the Mohists’ contemp- ahatma Gandhi “embraced orary significance, said Ip, the group “And, most importantly, by Mthe enemy” by moving has been little studied, and much of requiring the Mohists to understand beyond his own national and what has been written about them and work with others, including the cultural identities in order to fails to do the movement justice. enemy, they were pressed to transform Indian anti-imperialism Until the 1990s, Mozi was presented develop a great capacity for being into a force that would help the as “a crude utilitarian ascetic who other-oriented, which made them colonized and colonizers alike. sold the concept of impartial love walk a fine line between their His great-granddaughter, Leela that must benefit.” culture and its opposite.” Gandhi, writes of marginalized Though this image has been It is because of their immense groups in the West achieving cross- debunked by some, “scholars capacity for “other-orientedness” cultural collaboration by forsaking basically accept the view that to that “Mohism is a welcome addition their imperialist identities. implement the ideal of impartial love, to the contemporary repertories of Such letting go of the egocentric the Mohists paid more attention to nonviolent action, opening a world self, says Research Fellow and the control of external behavior than of imagination regarding how OSU historian Hung-yok Ip, “is a to the inner world from which nonviolent agents can relate to malleable mode of self-formation outward performance derived.” outsiders carrying values and living which I would like to call unbound Though it’s true, Ip agrees, that lives different from their own.” identity.” The question of how to the Mohists’ discussion of the construct such a non-egocentric internal realm is limited, and the Hung-yok Ip is the author of self lies at the heart of her research nonviolent practitioners were Intellectuals in Revolutionary China: into nonviolence and the formation determined to stay committed to Leaders, Heroes and Sophisticates of moral philosophies, specifically, their social-political identity, she (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). the contributions of Mohism, a argues that “they were, when school of philosophy founded in necessary, able to liberate China by Mozi during the period themselves from their position and 475-221 B.C. its intellectual-emotional During this era, known as the constraints.” 3 Citizenship debate helped define ‘disabled’ very one of us— from those “In overthrowing monarchy and Ewith slight nearsightedness to the political culture that sustained it, the totally blind, for example— the Revolution raised a new and labors under some level of perplexing question. What qualities disability, but it is society’s might be used in a system of response that categorizes certain popular sovereignty to differentiate persons as “impaired.” among ‘the people’ and to “Like race, class, and gender, in determine the respective rights, other words, disability is a socially responsibilities, and obligations of constructed category of difference,” the new government and their said Ben Mutschler, an assistant citizens?” professor of history at OSU. Beginning in the 1760s and Mutschler is devoting his Center continuing through the turn of the Research Fellowship to a book on century, Americans engaged in a the ways in which considerations of protracted struggle over the ideal physical, mental, and social abilities abilities that citizens must possess. entered into debates over citizenship Ben Mutschler “Citizens were commonly rights in eighteenth-century expected to exercise self- America.

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