The Lambeth Appeal and the Appeal of Britain

In 1920, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops issued the “Appeal to All Christian People.” While much has been written on its genesis in 1920 and its impact on the later ecumenical movement and on Anglicanism, much less has been written about the relationship of the sort of ecumenism espoused by the Lambeth Appeal to the international political developments of the time. This article assesses the impact of the First World War and the Versailles Settlement on some of the assumptions underlying the Lambeth Appeal, examining how the appeal was in many ways a by-product of a new form of internationalism, which itself was closely related to the reinterpretation of the British Empire that emerged during the war.     

Why? Versus Why Not?: Potentialities of Aging in Shaw's Back to Methuselah

Bernard Shaw's critique of society's sacred cows, as well as his participation in the social, cultural and political marketplace in which he lived, resemble the new historical/cultural materialism of contemporary theory. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw examines the notions of aging and illuminates the degree to which our chronological standards of old age are sociological not biological constructs. This tour de force on aging both dramatizes age as a function of societal and/or individual choice, not as a biological given, and juxtaposes opinions toward aging in such a way that flexible attitudes toward the subject emerge.     

Training the brain: fact and fad in cognitive and behavioral remediation

Putatively safe and effective for improving cognitive performance in both health and disease, products purported to train the brain appeal to consumers and healthcare practitioners. In an increasingly health-centered society, these applications constitute a burgeoning commercial market. Sparse evidence coupled with lack of scientific rigor, however, leaves claims concerning the impact and duration of such brain training largely unsubstantiated. On the other hand, at least some scientific findings seem to support the effectiveness and sustainability of training for higher brain functions such as attention and working memory. In the present paper we provide a tectonic integration and synthesis of cognitive training approaches. Specifically, we sketch the relative merits and shortcomings of these programs, which often appeal to parents who must choose between side-effect-laden medication and other less conventional options. Here we examine how neuroplasticity allows the healthy as well the impaired to benefit from cognitive training programs. We evaluate the evidence and consider whether brain training can be a stand-alone treatment or an adjunct to pharmacotherapy, outline promising future prospects, and highlight what training outcomes are plausible in line with available data. Future research would determine whether the field of brain training realizes its potential to revolutionize education and rehabilitation or withers away engulfed in controversy.     

Analytic philosophy, 1925–69: emergence,management and nature

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that during the first half of the 1960s The Journal of Philosophy quickly moved from publishing work in diverse philosophical traditions to, essentially, only publishing analytic philosophy. Further, the changes at the journal are shown, with the help of previous work on the journals Mind and The Philosophical Review, to be part of a pattern involving generalist philosophy journals in Britain and America during the period 1925–69. The pattern is one in which journals controlled by analytic philosophers systematically promote a form of critical philosophy and marginalize rival approaches to philosophy. This pattern, it is argued, helps to explain the growing dominance of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century and allows characterizing this form of philosophy as, at least during 1925–69, a sectarian form of critical philosophy.     

She writes in many-coloured headscarves! A conversation with Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

Shelina Janmohamed, the British Muslim writer and commentator, feels impatient with the stereotypic labels attributed by the West to Asian Muslim women. Through her memoir, Love in a Headscarf, she breaks out all the miserable images of what it is to be a British Asian Muslim woman, addressing issues that range from Asian marriages to Islamic terrorism and the question of the veil.     

Ways of desiring mutual sympathy in Adam Smith's moral philosophy

In this paper, I address the question of what we are really after when we seek Smithian mutual sympathy; I also show how the answer I propose can be used to illuminate a crucial feature of Smith's moral philosophy. The first section develops a Smithian response to egoistic interpretations of the desire for mutual sympathy. The second section identifies a number of different self- and other-relevant ways in which one could desire mutual sympathy. Some of these different ways of desiring mutual sympathy comprise a spectrum of degrees of self-centredness; others comprise a spectrum of degrees of other-centredness. The third section shows that the spectra of ways of desiring mutual sympathy can be used to explain the kind of sincere, motivating attachment to morality characteristic of fully developed Smithian moral agents.     

Eliade on diplomatic service in London

It was in England that Mircea Eliade started writing the volume which would be published nearly a decade later as Traité d'histoire des religions (Patterns in Comparative Religion), as attested by the book's Avant-propos de l'auteur, dated ‘Oxford 1940/Paris 1948.’ Eliade also states in his autobiography (1988, p. 84) that ‘I read, took notes, and elaborated a plan of a vast synthesis of the morphology and history of religions, a synthesis I had glimpsed instantaneously in an air raid shelter during an alarm.’ In order to recreate the historical and political environment in which Eliade conceived and began to write his fundamental theoretical book, I have sketched the history of Great Britain's early involvement in World War II, the dramatic political events in Romania during Eliade's diplomatic service in London, and the British government's intrigues that held him a virtual ‘captive’ from September 1940 to February 19411