Technology and ocean‐scape: Defining the deep sea in mid‐nineteenth century

The ocean's profound inaccessibility makes it impossible to comprehend except through the mediation of technology. The first investigators to explore the great depths were hydrographers whose work was animated by mid‐nineteenth century growth of political, economic, and cultural interest in the oceans. While submarine telegraphy certainly boosted ocean science, interest in this field derived first from commercial concerns related to whaling and shipping as well as the intellectual pursuits of physical geography and questions about the existence of life at great depths. Hydrographers’ developing conception of the oceanic environment never represented a clear translation from technology. Dramatic changes in the understanding of the shape of the deep‐sea floor testified to the complexity of interaction between sounding machines, methods, and interpretations of depth. The shifting image of the sea floor not only reflected increasingly accurate measurements, but also mirrored shifting human motivations for studying this unexplored territory.     

HUME,HISTORY, AND THE USES OF SYMPATHY

This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers’ emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering—such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots—while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth-century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers’ sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence.     

King Davidʼs Exposure while Dancing: A Queer Reading of 2 Samuel 6

According to the Hebrew version of the transport of the ark to Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 6, King David is so scantily dressed that he publicly exposes himself while dancing before G*d (????). David?s wild, gay and possibly sexual conduct can evoke associations with the behavior of gay persons of today. Queer readers may identify with David and like him turn their backs on dominant rulers—like the members of Saul?s dynasty—if they are not respected because of their queer way of life, but persecuted—as David was persecuted by King Saul. Such an interpretation implies that G*d (????) is on the side of persons like King David, who—from the point of view of other people as well as of David?s wife Michal—behave in a strange fashion, thus act queerly.     

From “Holocaust” to “Rational Choice”: Generational Change in Political Science

Abstract

David Walsh has demonstrated a unique gift for reading modernity sympathetically, for discerning within it a certain luminosity, in fact a distinctly Christian luminosity, without losing sight of modernity's darkest possibilities. In the magisterial concluding volume of his trilogy, he seeks to elaborate a “coherence” of modernity that is revealed not in concepts but only “through existence itself.” Finally, though, Walsh's enthusiasm for a purely open and therefore purely formal understanding of practical existence, articulated through brilliant, original, and remarkably comprehensive readings of the greatest authors of the continental tradition, seems to me to draw him very far away indeed from actual moral and political practice, and thus from the reality of our human condition. A truer and more truly “performative” attention to “the nature of practice itself” would be less inclined to praise pure freedom or openness and more solicitous of the actual horizons of common worlds, including implicit metaphysical and hierarchical elements.     

‘Why did they take him away?’ The theft of Neddy Larkin

Neddy Larkin, a Bundjalung man from New South Wales, Australia, was stolen from his grave and in 1891 sold to the Peabody Museum, Cambridge, MA. This paper uses the methodology and concepts outlined in Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence to chart Neddy Larkin’s transitions from kinsman to scientific data.