Italian and Russian Proverbs as A Reflection of National Values

Speaking about the functions of language, along with its main function - communicative - it is necessary to highlight such a function as the guardian of culture. According to the English scientist Oliver Wendell Holmes, "every language is a temple in which the souls of the speakers are carefully preserved". That is why language, as the guardian of national culture, plays an important role in the formation of national thinking and, accordingly, the national character of a particular people. Keywords: national-cultural specifics, linguoculturology, paremiological space, comparative study, paroemia.

Vitality, Racial Creativity, and Biopolitics

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Literary Neurophysiology

Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

A jurisprudência como categoria social: multiplicações de Deleuze...

Resumo Em duas entrevistas reunidas em Pourparlers, Gilles Deleuze afirmava que a jurisprudência seria a verdadeira filosofia do direito. Ao mesmo tempo em que declarava a prescindibilidade dos juízes, Deleuze advogava que a prática jurisprudencial fosse atribuída a “grupos de usuários”, assinalando aí o ponto em que se passaria do direito à política. Essas teses sugerem a possibilidade de adotar a noção deleuziana de jurisprudência como categoria social. Prolongando essa hipótese, este ensaio questiona se e como a jurisprudência poderia constituir uma categoria do pensamento social, promovendo uma interação deformante entre os campos da filosofia, da teoria social e do direito, especialmente a partir do realismo jurídico de Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., e das reinterpretações de Laurent de Sutter, das descrições etnográficas de Bruno Latour sobre o direito e das teses de Gilles Deleuze sobre a sua filosofia.

Edwards’s Place and Importance in Anglo-American Literature

Long recognized as foundational contributions to British American belles lettres, the works of Jonathan Edwards influenced later writers and shaped narratives of American literary history. Edwards appears in the first descriptions of early American literature, and he continues to figure prominently in anthologies and histories of American writing today. This essay emphasizes major authors—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to Robert Lowell, to Marilynne Robinson—who have acknowledged his influence. The nature of that influence varies, for every generation creates a distinctive version of Edwards. Advancing a liberal vision of Christianity, Stowe and Holmes reacted against Edwards’s alleged theological rigidity and spiritual cruelty. Lowell wrote poems reflecting the Edwardsean revival of the mid-twentieth century and bearing the imprint of the New Criticism. And in recent years, Robinson has staked a claim as a latter-day Edwardsean, embracing his intellectual legacy as an inspiration and resource for her celebrated novels.

The Classic Arguments for Free Speech 1644–1927

This chapter examines the classic arguments for freedom of speech. It traces the first comprehensive argument for freedom of speech as a limiting principle of government to John Milton’s Areopagitica, a polemic against censorship by a requirement of prior licensing in which Milton develops an argument for the pursuit of truth through exposure to false and heretical ideas rather than the passive reception of orthodoxy. Despite Milton’s belief in the advancement of understanding through free inquiry, he was far from liberal in the modern sense of that term and he did not, for instance, extend the tolerance he advocated to Catholic religious texts. The chapter then assesses what James Madison had to say about the role of public opinion as a crucial element in the creation of political authority and the preservation of rights, and considers Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr’s opinions about the freedom of speech. It also looks at how the celebrated federal judge Learned Hand conceives of the freedom of speech as a majority-creating procedure rather than an individual right, while Justice Louis Brandeis understood the freedom of speech to be an individual liberty important as such but especially important for its contribution to democratic character. Ultimately, the most widely-read of the classic arguments for free speech is that developed by John Stuart Mill in his Essay On Liberty.

8. Historical and anthropological jurisprudence

This chapter, which discusses the development of historical and anthropological jurisprudence, first identifies the characteristics that distinguish the Western legal tradition from other systems. It then discusses the German Romantic Movement, which found its most powerful spokesman in jurist, Friedrich Karl von Savigny; its foremost champion in England was Sir Henry Maine. Maine exercised a significant influence over what has come to be called anthropological jurisprudence or legal anthropology, an approach to law that developed in the twentieth century and which was recognized as essential to an understanding of law by the American realist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

6. Legal realism

This chapter first addresses the question: What are realists realistic about? It discusses how this movement had little time for ‘theory’, and regarded the essence of law as what courts actually do in practice. The leading exponents of American realism: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Karl Llewellyn, and Jerome Frank are discussed. They have been criticized for their obsession with courts, juries, lawyers and other features of the legal system, but are regarded as an important bridge to the sociological approach to law. The chapter then examines the Scandinavian realists: Alf Ross and Karl Olivecrona whose approach, while it is described as ‘realist’, is markedly different from their American counterparts. The relationship between Scandinavian realism and psychology is briefly considered.