By revisiting the works of the eclectic and controversial thinker Giovanni Papini, the chapter shows how pragmatism was much more than an original American product. It was a transnational philosophical approach involving many people on both sides of the Atlantic enmeshed in a kaleidoscope of different philosophical traditions, whether voluntarist, immanentist, or historicist. By framing the pragmatist tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, I show that Vico’s intellectual resurrection in the early twentieth century and the parallel success of pragmatism in the same period are somewhat linked. They both resulted from a widely felt obsession with human action and an uncompromising contempt for all kinds of barren intellectualism.

Chapter 5 turns, at last, to the more conventional resource for Christian ethics, namely the Bible. It looks specifically at the way that teleios and teleioö (adjective and verb) are used thrice each in Matthew, in Paul and in Pauline letters, but most frequently in Hebrews where Jesus is seen as being perfect and without sin and in the Septuagint variously depicting human, and more occasionally divine, perfection.

Chapter 10 argues that, after choosing between Stories and refraining from undermining too many of them, scholars should, occasionally, also dissemble. The point is that if all Stories are false and some of them are worse than others, we must choose and teach Stories that are less bad than the worse. But even those alternative Stories will be false, in which case scholars should take into account that even while they are promoting what they consider to be a better Story, it will not be entirely true. Some implications of this situation appear in works by Jill Lepore, Wilfred McClay, and William James.

This chapter addresses Muriel Rukeyser’s Depression-era poetics in the context of documentary photography and claims that her poetics rejects the logic by which language became complicit with photography in rendering aestheticized and therefore consumable images of the modern world. Instead, Rukeyser’s poetics envisions a new, hybridized mode in which language, in this case that of the poem, exists in a critical tension with the photographic image. This chapter also argues that “extension,” a concept that relates Rukeyser’s work to commentaries by Lewis Mumford, Vannevar Bush, and Marshall McLuhan, among others, functions as a critical concept describing the process by which poetic language becomes a counterpoint to the public archive of images generated by emerging commercial media and a technocratic state. The final section examines the thematization of photography in “The Book of the Dead” to claim that Rukeyser’s epochal 1936 long poem, which documents a mining disaster in Depression-era West Virginia, scrutinizes the prerogatives of photographic seeing by rendering the photographic apparatus into a visible component of the industrialized rural landscape the poem surveys.

The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

What happens to productive continence after the turn of the twentieth century? The medical profession ceased to mention it as belief in the dangers of sex (and indeed, many of its actual risks) began to wane; but it never quite disappeared from the popular imagination. The Conclusion asks in what further directions the book’s work could be taken and proposes a particular relevance to studies of artistic ethics outside of Decadent literature, for instance, in the work of Henry James and Ezra Pound. It suggests that a similar approach to other texts and discourses can complicate and revitalize our approach to Victorian sexuality.

Functional psychology was less a system than an attitude that valued the utility of psychological inquiry. Assuming a philosophical underpinning from the pragmatism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, functional psychology fit well into the pioneering spirit of America. From its beginning, functional psychology had a clear emphasis on applying psychology to individual and social improvement, as was evident from the works of Münsterberg, McDougall, and Hall. The tradition of British natural science and evolutionary theory was integrated into psychology in the views on adaptation championed by the Chicago functionalists, such as Dewey, Angell, and Carr. Mental testing and the study of human capacity constituted important areas of investigation among the Columbia functionalists, represented by Cattell, Thorndike, and Woodworth. Although its reaction to structural psychology kept functional psychology from developing a systematic alternative model of psychological inquiry, this phase of American psychology resulted in two critical benefits. First, functionalism firmly entrenched the new science of psychology in America and imposed on it a particular American orientation toward applied psychology. Second, functional psychology provided a necessary transition from the restricted context of structural psychology to more viable models of psychology, permitting the science to progress.

This chapter discussed the general precursors of the families of emotion theories to be discussed in the ensuing chapters: Darwin (1872) and James (1890b). Darwin (1872) proposed an evolutionary and eventually also a mechanistic explanation for emotional behavior, particular facial expressions. Initially goal-directed processes grow into habits (learned emotion-response links) and instincts (innate emotion-response links). Today these instincts are no longer of use, which is why they appear in weakened form as facial expressions. James (1890b), seeking a causal-mechanistic explanation for emotions themselves, proposed that stimuli activate instincts (innate stimulus-response links) and habits (learned stimulus-response links), which when enacted produce somatosensory feedback, felt as emotions. James’s (1872) theory accounted for the properties of ontogenetic and phylogenetic continuity, phenomenality, bodily aspect, heat, control precedence, and irrationality, but has difficulty delivering the right kind of (world-directed) Intentionality, and even the right kind of heat. James (1872) rejects partitioning the set of emotions into discrete subsets. Empirical evidence pro and contra James’s (1872) theory is discussed.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

This chapter discusses James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, and Jude, as well as the origins and implications of the nomenclature for these writings. Among the critical issues to be discussed are Johannine sectarianism andthe literary relationship between Jude and 2 Peter.

Despite his role in pragmatism’s resurgence, when it comes to classical pragmatism Rorty’s work has blocked the road of inquiry. His selective interpretations spurred sharp lines of demarcation distinguishing “classical” or “paleo” pragmatism from its “neo” and “new” offspring to protect both classical and new pragmatisms alike from Rorty’s distortive readings. This chapter seeks to move contemporary pragmatism beyond these impasses by investigating largely unexamined avenues of shared commitment between Rorty and Peirce, Dewey, and James. I argue that Rorty is best read as reconstructing classical pragmatism rather than misunderstanding it. After establishing Rorty’s underappreciated early engagement with pragmatism, I trace the influence of Peirce on Rorty’s thought, which includes a commitment to language and to a distinct form of realism which was later obscured. Recognizing Rorty’s notion of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a close relative of Dewey’s conception of philosophy as cultural criticism yields complementary insights overshadowed by the experience vs. language debate. I then elucidate the shared ethics of belief that emerges from James’s “unfinished” universe and Rorty’s recognition of contingency to guide their commitments to agency and a conception of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the construction of what is right and true.

This chapter addresses the moral justifiability of some of the international legal rules that govern cross-border trade.The primary focus is on the moral standards that ought to be used to critically evaluate those rules or proposals for their reform.Thus the chapter investigates several moral arguments for free trade, such as the claim that it provides an especially effective mechanism for alleviating poverty, and several arguments in defense of restrictions or conditions on trade, including the moral permissible of partiality to compatriots and the right of those who cooperate to make international trade possible to a fair share of the benefits it yields.The chapter concludes with an examination of the argument that the import and consumption of oil and other natural resources from countries ruled by tyrants constitutes trade in stolen goods, a violation of existing international law.

This chapter traces the emergence of a prosthetic modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It suggests that the literature of the fin de siècle, from Bellamy and Wells to Gilman and Wilde, registers a shifted relation between the interior and the exterior of being and between the figurations of surface and depth in the artwork, produced by the development of a new period in the history of modernity. This shifted relation is discernible in the late-century realism, but it is in the first stirrings of the modernist form that it comes to a new kind of expression. The chapter reads this new modernist relation between inside and outside, between surface and depth, as it is given expression in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James, particularly in The House of Mirth, and in What Maisie Knew. These works depict a duplication of consciousness, a sense that the novel imagination encounters itself always at remove from itself, but they also produce a new formal means of giving this duplicated consciousness a unity, of bringing depths onto the modernist surface of the artwork.

This first chapter of Part III looks at Rahab’slong and complex afterlife in the history of biblical interpretation. For the rabbis, she represents the prototypical “righteous proselyte” who, despite her Canaanite descent and fame as a fille de joie, becomes a full member of Israel. For the first Christian interpreters, her story illustrates foundational theological principles, such as the relationship between faith and works. These differing approaches reflect an abiding tension between Christian and Jewish approaches to the Bible, both ancient and modern. Because that tension bears directly on our central concern with war and national identity, we compare in what follows a number of early readings of the biblical account. In doing so, we will deepen our appreciation of the ideals, ethos, and concerns that shaped biblical war commemoration as a politico-theological discourse, as well as the competing understandings of “belonging” in early Jewish and Christian communities.

Kant’s moral argument for faith in God aims not at converting unbelievers but at offering those who believe a reason for principled assent to the existence of God on moral grounds. It is based on a rational connection between purposive action and assent that applies not only to religious belief but to many other purposes as well, such as what Royce called “loyalty to a lost cause.” The argument in the Critique of Pure Reason differs significantly from its presentation in later works. Kantian moral faith is in tension with Cliffordian evidentialism but not inconsistent with it, and the two together constitute the doxastic virtue lying between the twin vices of uncritical credulity and stubborn incredulity; together they enable us to avoid the complacencies of both despairing resignation and overconfidence.