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The figure of Christopher Columbus was a key trope in the programming for the BBC's Latin American Service (LAS) and West Indian Service during the Second World War. This paper analyzes four dramas and one feature program from the 1940s that not only dramatize events from Columbus's life but also reflect the contemporary broadcast context by promoting British war interests and showcasing Latin American and Caribbean histories and geographies. These commemorative programs are broadly hagiographic, but they also reveal the BBC's awareness of how Latin American and West Indian audiences might variously respond to portrayals of Columbus and European colonization. Using radiogenic strategies including immersive aurality, the interplay of different historical narratives, and multivocality, these programs reveal the relationships between the BBC's institutional aims in overseas broadcasting and Latin American and West Indian program creators' literary and political goals. The portrayals of Columbus in the 1940s served an allegorical and ultimately propagandistic purpose, demonstrating the role of faith and perseverance amid turbulence and conflict, and inducing, by analogy, sympathy for Britain's war effort. The authors commissioned to write, produce, and deliver these dramas were not simply responding to propaganda guidelines; they were responding to the demands of the corporation and the war effort while also pursuing their own commitments and literary ambition. Ultimately, the scripts produced by the BBC for broadcast to the Americas reveal Columbus and his voyages as polysemic symbols of the regions' relationship to their past and their relationships to Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Peirce's concept of analogy. I begin by arguing that he understands it along two main lines: (1) as a natural cognitive operation that discerns the resemblance of structural relations, pivotally signified by the diagram sign-class, and (2) as a "mixed" form of argument employing abduction, deduction, and induction. After exploring these two aspects, along with their interpenetration, I compare Peirce's account of analogous reasoning with the highly influential view of the late-Medieval scholastic Thomas Cajetan. I argue that Peirce presents a superior approach because his diagrammatic logic renders a view that is methodologically open to further inquiry, explains that openness in terms of inference through sampling, and capaciously accepts a variety of potential determinations for any one analogy due to the objective vagueness of signs. Cajetan's appeal to the irreducible proportionality of analogous thinking, on the other hand, excludes further explanation of analogy's workings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the mid-19th century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists—especially Jevons and Walras—viewed Cournot's (1838) book on mathematical economics as a seminal work on which they could build. Surprisingly, the scientist, philosopher, and logician Charles S. Peirce discovered Cournot before the marginalist economists and possessed a deeper appreciation of his mathematical approach. While Peirce's contributions to economics are limited, the influence of economics on his philosophy is subtle and not well understood. In a number of fragments, Peirce, who, despite Ricardo's lack of mathematical form, nonetheless regarded him as a paradigmatic mathematical economist, refers to "Ricardian inference" as a fundamental contribution to scientific method. Two options, perhaps complementary, are explored as to exactly what Peirce meant by "Ricardian inference." On the one hand, he associates Ricardo with the "primipostnumeral syllogism," which is a sort of generalization to uncountably infinite sets of what Peirce calls Fermatian inference (often referred to as mathematical induction). On the other hand, he holds up Ricardo as an exemplar of the "analytical method," which is Peirce's name for a hybrid form connecting analogy, abduction, and induction. On either account, economics plays a larger and more fundamental role in Peirce's philosophy of science than is generally understood. In the Harvard Lectures the two threads are linked together in Peirce's use of an economic example to exemplify pragmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein introduced the peculiar analogy of a "reference-mollusk," suggesting that spacetime could no longer be envisioned as a fixed background where events are displayed, but rather as a mollusk-like creature shaped by energy and matter. Although the image received a lukewarm response from the physics community, its ambiguity allowed for creative exchanges across disciplines. The analysis of the invertebrate's metamorphoses in the writings of Paul Valéry (where it first appeared), Francis Ponge, and Italo Calvino, reveals that the molluscan analogy had a significant influence on their poetics and on the creation of a new literary space defined and "curved" by a dynamic interaction among the author, the text, and the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called chapter on the wayward son (ben sorer u-moreh) is a foundational and popular text for study in rabbinic schools of learning, wherein the ancient rabbis grappled with a severe biblical law that punished the willfully disobedient son with death (b. Sanhedrin 68b-75a). The discussion touches on many social issues, but the topics of gender and sexuality tend to be neglected in these institutional settings due to their uncomfortable misogynistic undertones. A feminist analysis attuned to philological, historical, and Talmudic research highlights the misinterpretations that result from neglecting direct engagement with these aspects of the text. This article unpacks the logical shortcuts that the rabbis have used to describe gender relations in one particular unit, but in doing so highlights the significance of analogical thinking in rabbinic literature more broadly. The rabbis have employed violent analogies as shortcuts to describe gender relations, and, unexposed, they continue shaping the imagination of readers and students today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]