A Review of “The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt,Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government”

ABSTRACT

As Aristotle and Augustine both noted, virtue constitutes a particularly difficult subject for political analysis. Limited to hearsay evidence of the state of the consciences of our fellows, we are severely limited in our capacity to use real-world experience as a gauge on the interaction between humility and politics. I have circumnavigated this obstacle by taking a literary perspective, asking what authors, in their privileged status as creators of their characters, can tell us about the relationship between humility and politics. In King Lear and The Lord of the Rings the authors offer similar solutions to the difficulty of identifying humility in politics: to see the humility of others, one must possess it oneself. The ability to perceive humility in political action, as Tolkien and Shakespeare further suggest, opens the door for the formation of critical political alliances.     

A Review of: “Theodore L. Sourkes. The Life and Work of J.L.W. Thudichum (1828–1901).”

This article explores the short history of “neuroscience” as a discipline in its own right as opposed to the much longer past of the brain sciences. It focuses on one historical moment, the formation of the first British “neuroscience” society, the Brain Research Association (BRA), renamed in 1996 to the British Neuroscience Association (BNA). It outlines the new thinking brought about by this new science of brain, mind, and behavior, it sketches the beginnings of the BRA and the institutionalization of neuroscience in the British context, and it further explores the ambiguous relation the association had towards some of the ethical, social, and political implications of this new area of research.