Blockchain Papers

Allison Margaret Bigelow

On the back cover of Sara E. Johnson's phenomenal new work, Jennifer L. Morgan declares, “This is the book we have been waiting for.” That blurb is no exaggeration. In this beautifully written, brilliantly framed, painstakingly researched communal biography, Johnson makes critical interventions to Black studies, Atlantic history, and comparative literature. She does so by working across visual mediums and alphabetic languages (Dutch, English, French, Kikongo, Kreyòl, Mandarin, Spanish) that are preserved in and omitted from archives in and about the eighteenth-century Caribbean, metropolitan France, and the multilingual book market of Philadelphia.Each intervention—pertaining to frame, art, and language—relates to the others. Whereas the historiography has long focused on actors like Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a multilingual scholar, proslavery advocate, avid bibliophile, and sadistic violator of human rights—in sum, “a repugnant man”—Johnson shows why traditional biography is methodologically and ethically inadequate for Caribbean history (p. 237). Here, instead, Moreau is an “unreliable center” whose extensive literary production surfaces the experiences of the Black women, children, and men whose stolen knowledge and labor made his books possible (pp. 4, 12). In chapter 4, “Encyclopédie noire: Part II,” Johnson re-creates the social world of an unnamed woman, identified only as “mulâtresse,” who appears in Moreau's Parisian diary on February 9, 1787, with an analysis of what can and cannot be glimpsed (pp. 142–48). Chapter 1, “Encyclopédie noire: Part I,” analyzes passages excised from Moreau's published geography on Saint-Domingue to show how his work could not hold the contradictions of racial slavery. Johnson's careful—and caring—attention to materiality appears thematically and structurally throughout the book, often upending dominant conventions. Portions of chapter 7 are set upside down so that readers adopt the perspective of women and men who lived with slave owners’ names branded into their skin. Johnson's “illustrative storytelling” blends sight and sound to re-create affective, humanizing experiences—including misunderstood languages and intentional silence. This critical reframing is the book's first intervention.The second intervention uses artistic creation to reclaim space. Chapter 3, “Print Culture and the Empires of Slavery,” appears in Bodoni font, the closest to Moreau's, in contrast to the other chapters’ Garamond, as a call “to glean meaning from the design of the words and the material conditions that made their production possible” (p. 88). Moreau's attention to books belies his disregard for humans; he treated bound volumes as if they were alive, “even though he knew they were not,” and Black lives as if they were “without feelings for kin that approximated his own, even though he knew that this was not true” (p. 241), as Johnson argues in chapter 8, “Encyclopédie noire: Part III.” Surfacing the mechanics of Moreau's choices proves that he was no mere “man of his times” but an active shaper of white supremacist political economy (pp. 2–3, 58). A counterpoint to Moreau's fabulations is a remarkable range of original art—collages that combine eighteenth-century portraits and twenty-first-century designs; prints, watercolors, and sequins that tell and retell; juxtapositions of newspaper ads, scholarly glosses, fiction, and digital media; composite title pages from primary sources about Chinese history; remixed page proofs from Moreau's Mémoire justificatif (1790)—many in collaboration with artist Luz Sandoval.Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Moreau's multilingual worlds, the book's third intervention. Moreau manipulated the power politics of languages to position himself in enlightened spaces, even as he denied the knowledge and labor of the women and men whose ideas he extracted from Spanish, Guaraní, Kreyòl, and especially Kikongo. Both chapters flip the script on natural histories and vocabularies, genres that present themselves as objective registers of information, to show how they contributed to the denial of Indigenous and African knowledge systems.The global scope of the work shows the terrifying convergence of white supremacy, land and labor theft, and books. Yet the place-based stories of the Black communities and kinship networks that made Moreau's world are always at the center. When the archive is silent on their thoughts, feelings, and intents, Johnson insists that we speculate so that their stories claim space in our scholarship and create a record that future generations of researchers and artists can learn from. After all, writers like Moreau have been inventing so-called facts for 200 years. What is at stake in the scholarly policing that asks us to take Moreau at his word and to deny the same to the women, men, and children he abused?Johnson's stunning encyclopedia, grounded in Black thought and community, is designed as an “antidote” to the “poison” that Moreau, men like him, and the scholars who follow them have long put into Caribbean art, language, literature, and history (p. 246). At the heart of this act of scholarly rigor and artistic creation there are pain and generosity, trauma and pleasure, disgust and love, all at once. It is the greatest book that I have read in a long time.

Robert S. Stone

Previous articleNext article FreeAutos-da-fé: The Roles of a Saint in Spanish SicilyRobert S. StoneRobert S. StoneUS Naval Academy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTambién, vemos que las imágines cristianas no sólo miran a Dios, mas a nosotros y al próximo.1(Francisco Pacheco, 1649)In a recent essay on Africans in Renaissance Europe, Kate Lowe notes that “the first black European saint, San Benedetto (St. Benedict, known as ‘il moro’ or the Moor), lived in Sicily in the sixteenth century, although he was not canonized until 1807.”2 He is seen here in an eighteenth-century Spanish sculpture (fig. 1). Several versions of his life (1526–89) are to be found, ranging from a hagiographical sketch by Antonio Daza in 1611,3 to Antonino de Randazzo’s longer Italian account of 1623,4 to another short life by the Jesuit Sandoval in his 1627 treatise on slavery.5 Soon after the saint’s beatification in 1747, Joaquín Benegasi’s narrative poem was published,6 and on the two-hundredth anniversary of his canonization, in 2007, a booklet was published for pilgrims to the Santa María di Gesú monastery in Palermo where Benito, as the Spanish called him, entered as a lay brother to work in the kitchen and eventually, despite his illiteracy, was chosen to become the superior.7Figure 1. Anonymous, San Benito de Palermo, 1700–1725. No. Inv: CE0570. (© Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid.)The trajectory of Benito’s life is quasi-picaresque. Born in Sicily to converted Ethiopian slaves, this mendicant Franciscan friar was forced by papal decree to abandon the wandering life and join a cloistered order in which he thrived by virtue of his pious humility, intelligence, and character. It is not hard to see why he was fervently embraced by the Spanish crown as a model for the conversion of slaves, freedmen, and indigenes throughout the empire: “he represented the ideal, illiterate slave (Daza calls him a ‘santo idiota’), a docile and loyal laborer, pastor, and cook.”8 Today, churches dedicated to St. Benedict the Moor are found throughout the Americas and in the Philippines, with the greatest number by far in Brazil.In selecting Benito as a subject for Spanish comedias, the well-known Golden Age playwrights Lope de Vega and Luis Vélez de Guevara exploited his popularity in both high and mass culture. Furthermore, both dramatists had indirect contact with Sicily. Three of Lope’s patrons were either viceroys or sons of viceroys of the Two Sicilies;9 Vélez de Guevara, meanwhile, took part as a young soldier in turn-of-the-century campaigns in Savoy, Milan, and Naples. It is likely, therefore, that these authors knew something of Sicilian society under Spanish rule and that this awareness found its way into their plays, as will be argued below.A century ago, Benedetto Croce noted a lack of historical and literary studies on relations between Spain and Italy, a gap that remains today, although it is narrowing.10 In the pages of this journal, for example, Edward Muir surveyed contemporary Italian Renaissance scholarship and found its focus shifting forward from the fifteenth to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and southward from Florence toward the Mezzogiorno, stopping short of Sicily, however, with Peter Mazur’s New Christians of Spanish Naples.11 In modern Sicily there is a tendency to downplay the years of Spanish dominion by the Habsburgs and their Bourbon successors in favor of a more remote, more easily romanticized heritage of Hohenstaufen, Norman, Arab, Byzantine, Roman, and Greek rulers. This is an understandable and persistent postcolonial attitude—after all, rancor against the half-Spanish king Ferdinand II was a driving force behind Garibaldi’s revolt launched from Sicily in 1860. I will try to address the Sicilian-Spanish literary lacuna by viewing history through the prism of two seventeenth-century comedias de santo set in Palermo, Lope de Vega’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo (ca. 1607) and Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El negro del serafín (ca. 1643). Cognizant of Terry Eagleton’s formulation that one purpose of “fictionalizing history is to reconfigure the facts in order to throw into relief their underlying significance,” I will juxtapose situations in the dramas with aspects of Sicily’s sociohistorical reality at the time of their production.12In Sicily, the dominant institution of the age was the Spanish Inquisition, a presence characterized by William Monter as “overtly colonial and resented as such.”13 Another historian, Denis Mack Smith, describes the situation as follows: “From 1487 onwards the notorious Torquemada was sending Inquisitors to Sicily, and soon a permanent institution was properly organized with its headquarters in the royal palace at Palermo. Naples successfully resisted the introduction of the Holy office; but in Sicily, though there was some initial opposition to it, to be enrolled as an Inquisition official was soon regarded as a great privilege by the Sicilian nobility. The chief Inquisitors were always, or almost always, Spaniards.”14 That the Inquisition, consciously or not, found its way onto the Spanish stage is not surprising, given that the Holy Office’s power was predicated on a well-attended ritual, the auto-da-fé. Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer define this as “a public gathering in which the ‘penitents,’ as the Inquisition called them, paraded before a gathered crowd, wearing garments known as sanbenitos (smocks bearing an insignia symbolizing the prisoner’s crime) and corozas (similar to dunce caps) symbolizing shame.”15 The highly spectacular aspect of the auto-da-fé has been remarked on by historians, even when noting its modest execution rate as compared to other European juridical systems. Monter, for example, writes that “none pronounced its judgments more theatrically,” while Kamen is at pains “not to see the Inquisition as the only player in the dramas in which it participated.”16 Mack Smith points out that in Sicilian autos-da-fé “the choreography was always carefully devised to make each occasion entertaining and instructive for as many spectators as possible,” and Nadia Zeldes observes that in Palermo the “spectacle began with a procession, which made its way from the Inquisitor’s house … to the square beneath the Viceroy’s palace … [and] usually included the appareance [sic] of the inquisitors, the alguacil and other officials as well as armed familiars of the Inquisition.”17 In other words, the auto-da-fé was a cautionary sort of Grand Guignol avant la lettre, helping to explain its effectiveness as a tool for the enforcement of orthodoxy meant to instill a “salutary fear; as the Castilian glossator of Eymeric’s ancient handbook for Inquisitors remarked in 1578, ‘there is no doubt that to instruct and terrify the people by proclaiming the sentences and imposing the sanbenitos is a good method.’”18 The following analysis holds that the plays dramatizing the life of San Benito for a seventeenth-century public implicitly portrayed the implementation of this “salutary fear” even as they interrogated social behaviors deemed proper in the age.Of the black saints before and during the sixteenth century, Benito is the most historically verifiable. The others are most commonly North African early martyrs such as St. Victor, St. Perpetua, and St. Felicity, while the fourth-century ascetic St. Anthony of Egypt is considered to be the patriarch of all monks. Benito’s most renowned predecessor—the first black of any nation to be canonized—is St. Maurice, the individual composite of a legendary Egyptian battalion that refused to bow down before Roman gods. Yet his “historical existence is so doubtful that more than once the legitimacy of his cult has been vigorously contested.”19 Although Maurice’s very name resonates with North African Moorish-ness, artistic depictions regularly portrayed him as a black, and as such he became the patron for the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages. From this perspective, Benito was the early modern Habsburg heir apparent to Maurice, who was emblematic of “the Holy Roman Emperor’s right to rule nothing less than all the earth.”20 Depictions of St. Maurice diminished during the fifteenth century as the Atlantic slave trade developed; there are even late sixteenth-century paintings of a white St. Maurice by El Greco and the Italian artist Rómulo Cincinnato.21 Thus, the Spanish crown’s promotion of Benito seems to have been an attempt to find a “homegrown” saint whose reach would surpass that of St. Maurice. The Felipes of Spain, after all, headed “a global empire of which Italy was a central part,”22 and their patronage of Benito evinces a desire to be recognized on their own terms as rulers over people of all nations and races.23 Just after the appearance of Lope de Vega’s play in 1607, a direct link between the monarchy and Benito was established: “In 1608 King Felipe III contributed twelve-hundred ducados for the construction of a silver casket that would hold the remains of the future saint” (El rey Felipe III colaboró en 1608 con una limosna de mil doscientos ducados para la elaboración de un ataúd de plata donde reposasen los restos del futuro santo).24 The royal donor is alluded to in Vélez’s play when it is prophesied that “el monarca mayor del orbe todo / se nombrará tu dueño,” lines that equate the Spanish king with the Lord of all creation while predicting the slave’s service to both.25 The prophecy (an encomiastic trope) also seems to acknowledge Benito’s evangelical (and Spain’s political) power when it says that his “deeds will astound many nations, and tame lands across the sea.”26Contemporaneously, the Inquisition’s desire to place its imprimatur on Benito is asserted in the last sentence of the first hagiography, which grants permission for the future saint to be depicted with signs of celestial splendor: “And the holy Inquisition of Sicily, aware of his great holiness and many legally proven miracles, gave license for him to be painted with rays of light and a halo on his head as signs of his heavenly reward” (Y la santa Inquisición de Sicilia, atenta a su gran santidad y muchos Milagros jurídicamente comprobados, dio licencia para que se pintase con rayos de resplandor y diadema en la cabeza en señal de la que goza en la bienaventuranza).27 Does Benito’s path from a slave of man to a slave of God simply reflect his usefulness for the purposes of propagating orthodoxy? This is the interpretation foregrounded in the hagiographies. However, the dramatizations of his life would also have resonated with anyone living under the Spanish Inquisition as a critique of that institution and its officers. Although the Spanish Inquisition was the creation of the Catholic Kings, this did not mean that the Holy Office felt obliged to bend to the monarchy’s will at all times, and some of the conflict in the plays is attributable to discord of this nature. Furthermore, from a postcolonial, globalized, and “postracial” point of view, the substratum of honor disputes in both plays proves as interesting as the primary (if counterfactual) conversion tale, because it shows Benito cast in the role of mediator between Sicilian and Spanish nobles, pointing up sociopolitical tension on the island.Historically, one focal point for resentment of the Inquisition was the Holy Office’s familiars: “It was in the Italian provinces of the Spanish crown that the greatest and most successful revolts against the Inquisition occurred. There were risings in 1511 and 1526 in Sicily, caused partly by popular hatred of the tribunal’s familiars.”28 Familiars, men with written proof of a bloodline untainted by Jew or Muslim (a prerequisite to holding office in the Spanish bureaucracy), numbered at times in the thousands in Sicily. Even Lope trumpeted his status as a familiar on the frontispiece of several works, including El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, possibly as a way of immunizing himself against potential accusations of blasphemy. In any event, Sicilians “from all classes of society tried to become familiars and thus escape liability in proceedings which gave little chance to the accused. … In order to increase its authority throughout the island where it was deeply mistrusted as part of Iberian imperialism, the Holy Office adopted a policy of making rural noblemen into familiars; they eagerly grasped at a title which guaranteed immunity from arrest by royal officials and punishment by royal courts.”29These circumstances led to “guerrilla warfare” between viceroys and inquisitors in Sicily in the late sixteenth century.30 For example, when in 1589 the viceroy Alba tried and executed a familiar before the Inquisition’s tribunal could claim jurisdiction, “both parties appealed to Philip II who, after examining all the documents, wrote to Alva [Alba], March 29, 1590, strongly reproving him for bringing such scandal and discredit on an institution so necessary for the peace and quiet of the land.”31 The king “was firmly convinced that the Inquisition was essential to keep Sicily in subjection, which accounts for his upholding it against his own representatives.”32 Viceroy Alba, in addition to challenging the authority of the Inquisition during his tenure in Sicily, favored and consulted with Benito on occasion. Daza’s hagiography mentions this, and indeed, it is Alba whose daughter is exorcised by the saint in Lope’s play, an incident suggestive of the viceroy’s untenable situation, his near “possession” by an office more powerful than his. At the center of strife among Sicilians, Spaniards and their king, then, stands the Inquisition, which competed with the viceroy for the king’s favor, although in practice the two Sicilian Inquisitors were only answerable to the Suprema, the Holy Office’s high council in Madrid.33Historian Helmut G. Koenigsberger surmises that “nothing could show more clearly the confused and undeveloped state of Spanish ideas in imperial administration than [the] struggle between the civil government and the Inquisition in Sicily.”34 This state of affairs is in effect reproduced onstage alongside more imaginative scenes from the saint’s life. The two San Benito dramas gloss over Mediterranean history and more discreetly gloss Sicilian circumstances of the day in order to broach controversial topics without drawing the ire of the censor, paradoxically bringing us closer to the truth of the times. Beyond evincing the zeal of the newly converted, the dramatic role of Benito is that of a reconciler who curtails potentially disastrous clashes between representatives of the Spanish crown and officers of the local government, as well as between “honorable” men and women, all the while raising questions about the Inquisition.The Names of a SaintLope’s protagonist Rosambuco (Benito’s prebaptismal name in both plays) is at first blush a stereotype, as indicated by this name that signifies the blossom of the elderberry bush, a white flower emerging from a black-fruited plant. After a series of divine interventions, he is convinced that he should abandon his “natural” faith, Islam, for Catholicism. Although the historical Benito was as Sicilian as any first-generation child of immigrant parents, the plays foreground his purported Ottoman otherness, in spite of the Castilian Spanish he in to the of the African when one of is Beyond the of his life for a Spanish Benito’s is by his to a with legendary by in North while the name Rosambuco it also resonates with a Sicilian that was from a to a during Benito’s in the plays with and and commonly in popular with its in order to the his a for the through the of his with and the and by with However, the in the plays is so to modern that easily be from other such as that link Benito to the by its in either play is the of the name San In the alguacil when he calls Rosambuco him from the by Rosambuco to him as gran In the saint is to as the between Benito and the Inquisition is as as in in of The first the of the Saint Benedict order first the in the Middle this is by of or as “the insignia of the holy Inquisition, on the and of the insignia de la santa que y del terms and in the of the Holy Office to the saint’s a of which could have been a “a black on which were painted and other to wearing the had to it on he out of a practice by no popular in the first of the Monter notes that when to the had or to their sanbenitos be over an but from in order to be in churches as a of bringing on and for became practice to and sanbenitos with bearing the of the this caused “In the against the Spanish government in Sicily in the sanbenitos in the churches were down and In that in his in Palermo, as the wearing of on the sanbenitos of the who were very and he the people to the of from the Sicilian to Spanish rule was to the for at a before the saint of the name was as be from the were one to either was the would be the is felt from the in Lope’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, which with a from great an (and on the part of a good man into an life. The of a he to himself down from its but and he the slave of the In the of an honor an in a between the and who his of In an the first of several to Benito’s as a but this when his into a In as noted the future saint a from the viceroy’s to the Benito, but when the the of the over the it in calls an of a Benito his own life for that of who after to in a house the so of his that he is to he his is clearly that of an en a la then, did not out to the this He says he is with the of and as well as the of the Inquisition when a is to the / de a familiar of the Holy is the Inquisition, with while under the authority of Sicily’s are out in the name of honor and and when the Spanish him he the alguacil as “the man Sicily has al / que that and his in the even though his in the play place in the is and his near to Sicilian of the times. In 1590, for example, the made a of the of the up the house in which and his officials and were and would have … Soon when the to arrest some he was for a in Palermo that to the auto-da-fé. The first great auto-da-fé was in following for the first time in the of … It was that be on so as to public … The also on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own a that led to with officials of both and who were to of to the to the of Benito’s his cloistered years in an took on in an he would before the incident in Lope’s play his African for a thus his of has his to him by at the viceroy’s up and Spanish to each other as to a that is on the of the of in his raising about his Rosambuco to his for is only by the divine of a of the St. these not only the many autos-da-fé in Palermo in the sixteenth and seventeenth but also the of authority by the of in the Vélez play will be but more the with the that him from Lope’s to down house with the in as will be the African is and although not however, Lope’s slave a closer in the black “natural” for a for and as a critique of honor and the virtue of their in the of in these would have the who but not the that seems at first to be the black of the a to of the that make Rosambuco are in … The at even though they make an for the (and African slave for an Roman is the of the play is simply of the Spanish attempt to the for not only because it is a but because that are of will the in the Vélez Spanish popular in a that in Lope would into one of his most renowned El de The they the the of the flower of al a la de la de is by as / a la / de / la de is a of to but the a out of the the that a is very a of another for for calls to the place from which for the of This the that the de will for Golden Age Spain, the of honor that Lope as one to popular in his de comedias en is and but his in the and the to and the only punishment that seems to is that of with mentions it This to is by of the que to to a from a Benito, a in order to who this, Rosambuco of one of several by the it is who in the of Lope’s play to us that has an by the out the to the house from It is not the to as the seems to with some that the of Spanish is on a of and under the of the In that with all of the and in Palermo, will found a in honor of the saint, an that points the of the play to link Benito to Catholic play with the in Palermo of a de such as the one that had in the of popular an of orthodoxy in the of to the and of a such as the Holy the of an aspect of the or a each other in times of and most the Holy of the and in Spain to be of and to their purpose was that of a which and could be including “the struggle for in the creation of that were more than of the of the dominant of Spanish of any is the a by in This is from the that a of the Inquisition when over to the and led to the Lope’s play the with a of the saint, with a of from the a a and a of to Vélez de Guevara’s play, El negro del serafín with a of an on

Evert van Emde Boas

This chapter focuses on the agōn scene. The speeches of Clytemnestra and Electra are analysed side by side, using the traditional four-part division of oratorical speeches. It is argued that the overall organization and precise rhetorical techniques in the two women’s speeches (as reflected in the use of particles, tenses, and other linguistic features) are indicative of their characterization. Clytemnestra’s speech paints Agamemnon in as bleak a light as possible and uses sophisticated rhetorical proofs to reject alternatives to her killing of her husband. Her speech also reveals concern for her public reputation and an innovative outlook on women’s role in society. Electra, in turn, operates by conducting a prolonged character assassination of her mother while she ignores her father’s behaviour. Her somewhat disorganized speech comes across as emotional and spontaneous, particularly when her own exile and that of Orestes are at stake.

Andrew Roberts Cummings

Don Quixote Meets Mr. GradgrindA Neglected Proof for Immortality Andrew Cummings (bio) Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir! the character of thomas gradgrind; from hard times, by charles dickens But after all, Sir, if I know anything of the Matter, you have no Occasion for any of these Things; for your Subject being a Satyr on Knight-Errantry, is so absolutely new, that neither Aristotle, St. Basil, nor Cicero ever dreamt or heard of it. Those fabulous Extravagancies have nothing to do with the impartial Punctuality of true History; nor do I find any Business you can have either with Astrology, Geometry, or Logick, and I hope you are too good a Man to mix Sacred Things with Profane. from “the author’s preface to the reader,” [End Page 135] don quixote, by miguel de cervantes Although it might appear strange to have selected the above two passages as a lead-in to this article, they capture, I believe, the essence of what we have come to know as the “fact-value” distinction, albeit at an extreme level. Thus, Mr. Gradgrind shows in exaggerated fashion the obsession with facts, to the neglect of values. And the very image of a Don Quixote, bravely pursuing his own world of values, utterly cut off from the harsh world of facts, speaks for itself. A fair amount of discussion on this issue has tended to focus on the supposed divide between the “is” and the “ought” that David Hume so famously put forward.1 Yet at a general level, there is hardly a need today to enter into the details of any particular thinker in order to grasp what is at stake.2 It is captured succinctly by Hilary Putnam, who claims that “the idea that ‘value judgments are subjective’ is a piece of philosophy that has gradually come to be accepted by many people as if it were common sense.”3 Putnam further clarifies this position as holding that “‘statements of fact’ are capable of being ‘objectively true’ and capable, as well, of being ‘objectively warranted,’ while value judgments . . . are incapable of object truth and objective warrant.”4 The central contours of this position arguably can historically be traced, as Charles Taylor reminds us, “to a central feature of the great seventeenth-century revolution in natural science, that we should cease trying to explain the world around us in subjective, anthropocentric, or ‘secondary’ properties.”5 The resultant dichotomy between fact and value that has come down to us has assumed prejudicial proportions such that, even when one wishes to argue against it—as Putnam and Taylor do—the onus probandi is upon the detractors. As with so many other foundational philosophical distinctions, the real meaning is often not seen until at least some of the implications are brought to light. The fact-value distinction happens to have had an effect on the discussion of life after death—and consequently on the very notion of a “proof for the immortality of the soul.” A term like “wish-fulfillment,” so dear to Freudian analysis, and building on the Feuerbachian notion of a “human projection,” can be viewed as [End Page 136] just such an implication. Indeed, although many of the traditional lines of thought on the soul’s immortality appear in the form of “demonstrations,” it is easy to see how a Feuerbach or a Freud would claim that they are thinly disguised human longings, masquerading as facts (albeit of a metaphysical stature). That is, subjective phenomena like wishing not to die would be seen as sorely out of touch with the objectively warranted facts of the matter—which latter seem to point all too decisively to ultimate extinction. While these and other such claims do not necessarily discredit traditional proofs...

H. van Dijk, M. Polman

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Nicky Reeves

Argument The British Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, spent four months on a Scottish mountainside in 1774, making observations of zenith stars and coordinating a detailed survey of the size and shape of the mountain Schiehallion, in order to demonstrate and quantify what was known as “the attraction of mountains.” His endeavors were celebrated in London, where it was stated that he had given proof of the universality of Newtonian gravitation and allowed for a calculation of the relative densities of the earth as a whole and the earth near its surface. This paper argues that the “Schiehallion Experiment” was as much a trial of the precision of Maskelyne's instruments and their expert management as it was a trial of Newtonian theory. By tracing the biography of the key instrument used by Maskelyne, his zenith sector, we see how much personal credibility was a stake for him in Scotland. By considering the mountainside as a place to test and reveal the precision of astronomical instruments we see a link between the Scottish endeavors and Maskelyne's ambitions for the Greenwich Observatory.

Yannick Lemarchand

Before the Revolution, tax-collecting was a very profitable private business. Using fiscal receipts, tax-collectors lent money to the Crown, instead of giving it without delay, so the State paid interest on public funds. To accelerate the receipts of the Royal Treasury and to diminish the interest paid by the King, in 1716 the French government introduced a reform based on a key technical innovation: double-entry bookkeeping was used to control tax-collectors' activities. The experiment was gradually extended to the various branches of the royal finances, but the scope provided by the new system for more effective supervision rapidly met with the hostility of the financiers. These attempts to rationalize public finance were interrupted in 1726 and the four Paris brothers who were the promoters of the reforms were distanced from royal finances. After relating these events, this paper tries to measure their significance. The interest of this accounting change goes further than the technical aspects, because it was linked with a fundamental organizational change. The Paris brothers attempted to replace a set of decentralized contractual relations with a centralized bureaucratic administration, conceiving of accounting as a sophisticated instrument of supervision, able to modify the behaviour of the financiers. This experiment can be seen as an eighteenth-century example of what Foucault referred to as the emergence of disciplinary technologies. It was the product of the ambition for scientific government, such as was to be found throughout Europe during the Enlightenment, and the Paris brothers' manuscripts may be ranked among the first manifestations of a literature which was soon termed the 'science of administration'.

Tom Conley

Reviewed by: Heuretics: The Logic of Invention Tom Conley Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, by Gregory L. Ulmer; xiv & 267 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper. Heuretics designates areas of logic devoted to discovery and invention. This book sets out to reconfigure the metaphors that have dominated investigation since the advent of print-culture and the Columbian voyages. Adventure, quest, risk, discovery: Francis Bacon’s analogy of scientific research to oceanic travel established the stereotypes that Ulmer strives to dismantle. In 1962 Claude Lévi-Strauss noted in The Raw and the Cooked that in our time: “It is no longer a question of sailing toward other lands: only the voyage is real, not the earth, and the routes have been replaced by the rules of navigation.” With the advent of hypermedia, creation becomes an art of selection and combination. Truth gives way to discovery. Creation is likened to a programmed mélange of material ordered by negotiation, intuition, and strategy. Ulmer performs his proof—and proves his performance—by constructing a virtual staging of a multilayered commemoration he fashions from cinema, architecture, Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, American history, and autobiography. The result is a collage of signifiers that apposes literary theory, memory-arts, Gary Cooper’s persona in Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman, 1939), Columbian voyages, Platonic dialogues, and a canon of postmodern writings. Ulmer divides the book into four parts, the first of which crafts the overall method from Cartesian reason and Surrealist practices of juxtaposition and automatism. Part two offers a dynamic definition of choreography, the study of local, inherited, and originary areas in which subjectivity is born. In part three Ulmer [End Page 147] sets forth textual rehearsals, based on Lee Strasner’s Method (via Stanislavsky), that mobilize the space and time of his chosen materials. Part four, “Yellowstone Desert,” bring together the strands of the narrative embroidery into a gag-joke (a “puncept” on Custer and custard) that explodes in the author’s face. A good deal of the work turns on Ulmer’s treatment of chora. Exploiting its signifying potential (chora, corps, choral, chorus, coral) he discovers that the myth of the world’s creation recounted in the Timaeus begins when the demiurge makes an X from two strands of plasma. The chi is folded as colures of a sphere that becomes the globe. Nonetheless the presence of the self as an unknown (x) is inferred (in I, or ich). Ulmer shows that “in subordinating mystery to memory, and arguments to paradigms,” choreography will “engage the users’ premises in the process of learning, opening a mutually transforming circuit between judgment and theory, and hence affect not only (. . .) institutional practices (. . .) but human subjectivation as well” (p. 202). Patterned constructions replace the creation and resolution of enigmas. Hypermedia becomes the technology of new creation, while choreography comprises “the institutional practice for augmenting the intuitions of inference, for writing with the logic of the unconscious” (p. 224). Heuretics extends the field of play staked out in Ulmer’s Teletheory. Here is offered a scheme for creating multileveled texts that are both creative and critical and infinitely generative, and that invite readers to connect electronic media to the unconscious. Most readers will not fail to appreciate the wit of the exposition and the clarity of the creative method. Others will pause over some of its assumptions. Certain critical paradigms, such as the antithetical ontologies of Lacan and Derrida, appear easily reconciled. The unnameable traumas of history (genocide) and psychogenesis (the birth and growth of subjectivity) are glossed with an effortless art of citation (pp. 114, 233). The unconscious is assimilated into an easily “accessed” logic, the latter effortlessly “logging in” to the former. The redesign of the Columbian quincentenary indirectly ratifies some of the modes of control that flexible capitalism seeks to impose upon the unconscious. These four points require greater space of exchange in the rich and problematic dialogue that informs Ulmer’s stunning performance of theory. Tom Conley University of Minnesota Copyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Kostas Gavroglu

No abstract is available for this record.

Ruy de Queiroz, Luiz Carlos Pereira, Edward Hermann Hæusler

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC'2003). The Workshop was held in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil from July 29 to August 1, 2003, in the Escola de Minas of the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto ( UFOP ). WoLLIC is a series of workshops which started in 1994 with the aim of fostering interdisciplinary research in pure and applied logic . The idea is to provide a forum which is large enough in the number of possible interactions between logic and the sciences related to information and computation, and yet is small enough to allow for concrete and useful interaction among participants. Previous versions were held at: Recife (Pernambuco, Brazil) in 1994 and 1995; Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) in 1996; Fortaleza (Ceará, Brazil) in 1997; São Paulo (Brazil) in 1998; Itatiaia (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) in 1999; Natal (Rio Grande do Norte) in 2000; Brasília (Distrito Federal, Brazil) in 2001; Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 2002. Scientific sponsorship comes from the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics ( IGPL ), the European Association for Logic, Language and Information ( FoLLI ), the Association for Symbolic Logic ( ASL ), European Association for Theoretical Computer Science ( EATCS ), the Sociedade Brasileira de Computação ( SBC ), and the Sociedade Brasileira de Lógica ( SBL ). Funding was kindly given by:(i) CNPq ( Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico , the scientific and technological development council of the Brazilian Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia ) (grant 450709/2003-5);(ii) CAPES ( Fundação Coordenação de Apoio ao Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior , a Foundation for the Development of Higher-Education under the Brazilian Ministério da Educação e do Desporto ) (grant PAEP0565/03);(iii) FAPEMIG ( Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais , the Minas Gerais state foundation for the support of scientific research);(iv) Escola de Minas da UFOP ( Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto ). Contributions were received in the form of short papers in all areas related to logic, language, information and computation, including:pure logical systems, proof theory, model theory, algebraic logic, type theory, category theory, constructive mathematics, lambda and combinatorial calculi, program logic and program semantics, logics and models of concurrency, logic and complexity theory, proof complexity, foundations of cryptography (zero-knowledge proofs), descriptive complexity, nonclassical logics, nonmonotonic logic, logic and language, discourse representation, logic and artificial intelligence, automated deduction, foundations of logic programming, logic and computation, and logic engineering. Apart from the contributed papers (15), and the invited talks (5), the programme includes 5 tutorial lectures: 1. Algorithmic Randomness and Derandomization by Eric Allender (Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA) 2. Generalized Quantifiers by Lauri Hella (Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Philosophy, University of Tampere, Finland) 3. Implicit computational complexity by Jean-Baptiste Joinet (Preuves-Programmes-Systèmes, Université Paris 7, France) 4. Proof search foundations for logic programming by Dale Miller (INRIA/Futurs/Saclay, and Laboratoire d'Informatique, École Polytechnique, France) 5. Iterated theory change by Hans Rott (Institut für Philosophie, Universität Regensburg, Germany) All papers in the volume were reviewed by the program committee consisting of Mauricio Ayala-Rinóon ( Departamento de Matemática, Universidade de Brasília, Brazil ) Argimiro Arratia ( Depto. Matematicas, Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela ) Alessandra Carbone ( Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and Université de Paris XII, France ) Marcelo Coniglio ( Centro de Lógica e Epistemologia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil ) Gilles Dowek ( INRIA, France ) Arnaud Fleury ( Facoltà di Scienze, Università di Verona, Italy ) Dexter Kozen ( Cornell University, USA ) Maarten Marx ( ILLC, Faculty of Science, Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands ) Anto˚nio Carlos da Rocha Costa ( Escola de Informática, Universidade Católica de Pelotas, Brazil ) Dieter Spreen ( Fachbereich Mathematik, Theoretische Informatik, Universität Siegen, Germany ) Luiz Carlos Pereira ( Departamento de Filosofia, PUC-Rio and UFRJ, Brazil ) Jouko Väänänen ( Department of Mathematics, University of Helsinki, Finland ) Renata Wassermann ( Departamento de Cie˚ncia da Computação, Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil ) The organising committee consisted of Lucília Figueiredo ( Departamento de Computação, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil ) Fred Ulisses Maranhão ( Centro de Informática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil ) Anjolina Grisi de Oliveira ( Center of Informatics, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil ) Elaine Pimentel ( Departamento de Matemática, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil ) (Co-Chair) Ruy de Queiroz ( Center of Informatics, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil ) (Co-Chair) Maria Angela Weiss ( Departamento de Matemática, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil ) The volume will be published as volume 84 in the series Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science ( ENTCS ). This series is published electronically through the facilities of Elsevier B.V. and its auspices. The volumes in the ENTCS series can be accessed at the URL http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/entcs A printed version of the current volume has been distributed to the participants at the workshop in Ouro Preto. We are very grateful to the following persons, whose help has been crucial for the success of WoLLIC'2003: Mike Mislove, one of the Managing Editors of the ENTCS series, for his assistance with the use of the ENTCS style files; Thanks are also due to the Department of Mathematics of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and the Department of Computing of the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, which has provided the logistic support to the organising committee. August 2, 2003 Ruy de Queiroz, Elaine Pimentel, Lucilia Figueiredo