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James’s letter does not concern itself with the nature of humanity in the abstract. His message regarding the trials of Jewish messianists distributed outside the land of the Jews leads him rather to explore the perplexing paradox of the human predicament—called to faithful life patterns, to love of God and neighbor, on the one hand, overwhelmed by craving and sin, on the other hand. This undergirds a pro­found analysis of the human condition as well as its remedy in God’s true word.

A doctrine of original sin or of the human condition generally requires an account of how that sin or condition is transmitted. One would think there are two options for thinking about this. Either original sin is innate or it is acquired. Both would seem to be problematic, the former because all the available options involve untoward metaphysical commitments or implicate God in unacceptable ways; the latter because of the uniformity of the human condition the doctrine requires. In this article, I use conceptual advances within the cognitive science of religion and empirical research to advance a plausible model of what the human condition consists in and how it is passed down.

Questo commento intende rivisitare i forum “Ripensare l’euro-antropologia” pubblicati sulla rivista Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale prendendo in considerazione tre questioni specifiche: Chi sono i soggetti dell’antropologia europea? Chi sono i suoi altri? Chi sono i suoi autori? A partire dalla constatazione che l’antropologia europea non implica una fissità spaziale (non esiste il “lì” nell’antropologia europea), suggeriamo che il sapere dell’antropologia europea sia invece il risultato di diverse forme di scambi attraverso e tra le frontiere. Tuttavia, trattandosi di un progetto intellettuale e politico, discutiamo ulteriormente alcune delle contraddizioni, delle ambiguità e dei paradossi che stanno dietro questo “mondialismo” della disciplina. Osservando che l’antropologia europea in particolare dovrebbe costantemente cercare di mettere in relazione gli sforzi di posizionamento della pratica etica, evidenze empiriche, riflessione storica e teorizzazione umanistica, proponiamo forme innovative di collaborazione accademica, creazioni narrative e forme di appartenenza a/con i luoghi.

If there is one thing that contemporary borders are supposed to do, it is to clearly separate things out, clearly demarcate the difference between here and somewhere else. It is obvious that this is not always, or perhaps even often, successfully achieved: the world is full of unfinished, contested and overlapping political borders. Drawing first from examples provided by the European Union and Brexit, and then from the past and present experiences of migration and the movement of peoples to and from the island of Lesvos, the paper suggests that understanding borders as being entangled, both with contemporary and past relations and separations from other places, can help in understanding contemporary border dynamics.

Los romanos no aprobaban los druidas, en particular en el primer siglo de nuestra era, cuando parecen haber presentado el mayor problema como focos del nacionalismo galo-bretón. El escritor romano Tácito describía un hecho que tuvo lugar durante el ca­taclísmico “Año de los cuatro emperadores”, cuando Roma estaba sumida en el caos y, como resultado, surgieron rebeliones provinciales, incluyendo una revuelta en las tierras del Rin, liderada por Julio Civilis. Fue una época en la que la vulnerabilidad de la capital imperial sirvió para avivar las llamas de la superstición que siempre ardieron por debajo de la cubierta de racionalidad. De hecho, el episodio descrito por Tácito fue un fuego accidental más que un incendio, pero el asalto percibido sobre el principal icono de la romanitas, el Capitolio, simbolizó un ataque sobre la misma Roma y el Imperio. Según Tácito, druidas disidentes que operaban en la Galia y Britania difundieron el mensaje de que este desastre era un presagio que anunciaba un sísmico cambio de poder para las tierras septentrionales.

In this essay, I argue that someone who adopted a falsificationism of the sort that I have attributed to Nietzsche would be attracted to the doctrine of eternal recurrence. For Nietzsche, to think the becoming revealed through the senses means falsifying it through being. But the eternal recurrence offers the possibility of thinking becoming without falsification. I then argue that someone who held Nietzsche's falsificationism would see in human agency a conflict between being and becoming similar to that in empirical judgment. In the light of this conflict only the eternal recurrence would offer the possibility of truly affirming life. I end by discussing how this reading of the eternal recurrence solves a number of puzzles that have bedeviled interpreters.

Comparing the experience of neoliberal reform at the Universities of Manchester and Helsinki shows that not all forms of neoliberalization are the same, despite the similarities in structural changes. In this case, the key difference has to do with the the social value attached to the content of scholarship, and to what universities do. In Manchester, the reforms were in the name of trying to achieve excellence, full stop; in Helsinki, the reforms were in the name of trying to achieve excellence for a reason: to better serve scholarship and the social good. This difference suggests that there is nothing inevitable about neoliberal reform: the outcome is contingent, and that generates hope.

Proponents of the emerging field of P4 medicine (defined as personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory) argue that computational integration and analysis of patient-specific “big data” will revolutionize our health care systems, in particular primary care-based disease prevention. While many ambitions remain visionary, steps to personalize medicine are already taken via personalized genomics, mobile health technologies and pilot projects. An important aim of P4 medicine is to enable disease prevention among healthy persons through detection of risk factors. In this paper, we examine the current status of P4 medicine in light of historical and current challenges to predictive and preventive medicine, including overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Moreover, we ask whether it is likely that in silico integration of patient-specific data will be able to better deal such challenges and to turn risk predictions into disease-preventive actions in a wider social context. Given the lack of evidence that P4 medicine can tip the balance between benefits and harms in preventive medicine, we raise concerns about the current promotion of P4 medicine as a solution to the current challenges in public health.

During the Civil War, the United States Treasury began hiring female clerks to work within its departments, a decision that would lead to the federal government becoming, according to historian Cindy Sondik Aron, “the first large, sexually integrated, white-collar bureaucracy in America.” By 1864, a congressional committee had already begun looking into accusations that some of the women were mistresses of government officials and that the Treasury Department had been turned into a harem. A second scandal, this time playing out in the press in 1869, renewed the old imagery of the harem. This article looks at how female Treasury clerks were portrayed in the two most popular illustrated weeklies at the time, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, as well as The Days’ Doings and Harper’s Bazar, and the use of misleading visual tropes that called women’s characters into question. The employment of these pernicious “visual fictions” aided in the creation of stereotypes of working women that continued well into the twentieth century, which, in turn, contributed to the devaluation of white-collar women and their work.

Eric Hobsbawm, the noted British historian, in his masterful account of modernity writ large, suggests that the 20th century was the most violent in human history, highlighting crucial connections between capitalist expansion and bellicosity. Over the course of the twentieth century, and in particular over the past 60 years, the United States has indisputably become the global master of war. A military budget and a weapons arsenal that dwarfs those of all other countries, alongside its repeated incursions into other sovereign nations, are alone sufficient to earn the title.

O tratamento da estética de Schopenhauer forma um dos aspectos centrais de sua extensa visão filosófica de mundo. Apesar do tratamento ser perspicaz e sensível, a análise do gênio criativo conecta-se com o mais periférico exame da loucura no sentido em que ameaça solapar a concepção de Schopenhauer do eu. A loucura é caracterizada pela descontinuidade do self do indivíduo, que convida a uma comparação com a transição para a pura subjetividade da empírica subjetividade cotidiana durante a contemplação estética. Uma comparação com a loucura é até mais relevante para o gênio cuja exposição aos elementos sublimes da natureza está em paralelo com a exposição ao horrível que o louco é exposto. Ao comparar o princípio da loucura com o do estado estético, pode ser colocado em questão o que preserva a nossa identidade em toda a nossa mudança na subjetividade. Como Schopenhauer argumenta nosso conhecimento sobre a vontade é insuficiente, um apelo a isto como a fonte de continuidade é insatisfatório

RESUMEN: Este trabajo describe los alineamientos de sujeto y objeto en hñähñú (u otomí del Valle del Mezquital), y compara algunos rasgos gramaticales, léxicos y semánticos de estos con las correspondientes descripciones del otomí de Querétaro y del otomí de Acazulco. El análisis se basa en la caracterización del alineamiento semántico por Mithun (1991) y Donohue (2008), y en la del alineamiento de objeto por Dryer (1986) y Haspelmath (2005); los roles temáticos son definidos siguiendo la nomenclatura de la tipología de relaciones gramaticales de Bickel (2012). Por el lado del alineamiento de sujeto, los sistemas de S escindido en las tres lenguas comparadas presentan dos clases de verbos intransitivos: verbos con S no-agentivo (verbos-O), y el resto (verbos-A). Las tres lenguas difieren en cuanto al tamaño del léxico dentro de la clase de verbos-O, y en el número de verbos fluidos; la morfología de los verbos-O presenta contrastes menores entre las lenguas. Por el lado del alineamiento de objeto, la caracterización mixta (i.e., con rasgos tanto indirectivos como secundativos) del sistema del hñähñú a partir de cuatro criterios morfosintácticos sugiere que la marcación de objeto en lenguas otomíes obedece a mecanismos que van más allá de los roles temáticos.