In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism.

The sociosexual world of the premodern Middle East has been studied through a variety of sources ranging from legal documents to shadow theater. Most such sources are either prescriptive or transgressive: they uphold or subvert a normative framework, telling us more about the framework itself than about how it was inhabited by subjects in everyday life. This study introduces the Tıfli stories as a descriptive source that transcends the prescriptive–transgressive dichotomy. An Ottoman-Turkish genre of prose fiction produced at least from the 18th to the 20th century, the Tıfli stories were a protorealist form of “pulp fiction.” Where most sources sought to stabilize specific sociosexual roles, the Tıfli stories explored the ambiguities inherent in these roles. This study employs the Tıfli stories to interrogate understandings of the Ottoman sociosexual world that rely strongly on normative sources and to stage an approximation of how norms were negotiated in practice.

The study of ethnicity has long been shaped by a conflict between two broad positions, one of which may be called the circumstantialist or instrumentalist position, and the other the primordialist or affectivist position. The primordialists view ethnic sentiments as something existing prior to and not dependent on goal-oriented behavior and hence not subject to calculation. The circumstantialists, however, view ethnicity as a product of particular circumstances in which contingent groups, usually at the behest of elites within those groups, broaden and reconceptualize their particular group interests as being derived from a common primordial substance, thus generating ethnicity. These circumstantialist or instrumentalist arguments as a rule assume that the particular circumstances where such group redefinitions and extensions prove useful are either unique to, or at least much more common in, the modern age. Thus the circumstantialist approach usually implies a modernist one.

Les Canadiens francophones sont naturellement exposés à un environnement bilingue constant. L'influence de la langue officielle dominante – l'anglais – sur leur langue maternelle ne peut être ignorée. Vu la politique linguistique proactive actuellement en place dans la province de Québec, on peut s'attendre à ce que la presse écrite francophone soit très attentive à la protection de la langue qu'elle utilise. Cependant, plusieurs études (Théoret, 1991; Martel et al., 2001; Chaput, 2009) ont montré que la presse n’échappait pas au phénomène d'anglicisation tant les traces laissées par les contacts entre les deux cultures étaient visibles à l’écrit dans l'utilisation de termes anglais ou anglicisés. Se basant sur deux visions s'opposant sur le sujet, cet article se propose d’étudier si le contexte culturel et linguistique des lectorats a une influence sur le degré d'anglicisation de la presse écrite canadienne francophone. La première hypothèse admet que plus une communauté est exposée à l'anglais de façon répétée, plus la fréquence d'utilisation d'emprunts à l'anglais dans les journaux est élevée ; la deuxième se base sur le principe de survie de la langue qui veut que lorsqu'il y a insécurité linguistique, la protection du lexique est beaucoup plus importante. Basée sur un corpus composé d'une année entière de publications de trois quotidiens destinés à trois communautés francophones québécoises et outaouaise, cette étude analyse la fréquence d'utilisation de plus de 500 « anglicismes », plus précisément des emprunts lexicaux intégraux et hybrides. Les résultats obtenus semblent confirmer la deuxième hypothèse, vu que la région la plus bilingue des trois communautés affiche les chiffres les plus bas.

It is often argued that the requirement that moral obligations be ‘action guiding’ motivates the claim that one can be obligated to φ only if one can φ. I argue that even on its most plausible interpretation, this argument fails.

This article examines the idea of ‘Critical Networks’ as a way of studying the relational structures that shaped music criticism in the long nineteenth century. We argue that the personal, institutional and international networks that supported the dissemination of critical ideas about music are worthy of study in themselves, as they can yield insights beyond prevailing methodologies that centre on individual cases.

Focusing on the institutional culture of music criticism means looking beyond the work of individual critics and the content or influence of their views, towards the structures that determined the authoritativeness of those views and the impact of these structures in shaping the operation of critical discourse on music at the time. Examining these networks and how they operated around particular periodicals, tracing transnational exchanges of both ideas and critics, and uncovering the various ideological alliances that were forged or contested within critical networks, can not only provide a thicker context for our understanding of historical ideas about music, but it can also challenge current views about the history of our discipline and the kinds of structures that condition our own ideas about music and music history.

In a recent paper, Alvin Plantinga defends occasionalism against an important moral objection: if God is the sole direct cause of all the suffering that results from immoral human choices, this causal role is difficult to reconcile with God's perfect goodness. Plantinga argues that this problem is no worse for occasionalism than for any of the competing views of divine causality; in particular, there is no morally relevant difference between God directly causing suffering and God indirectly causing it. First, we examine Plantinga's moral parity argument in detail and offer a critical evaluation of it. Then we provide a positive argument, based on the doctrine of doing and allowing, to show why there is a morally relevant difference between God's direct and indirect causation of suffering.

Hypocrisy challenges religious belief in two ways. Arguments to Absurdity contend hypocrisy is defeasible evidence of the irrationality of a doctrine or practice. Arguments from Betrayal contend that hypocrisy confronts institutionally loyal believers with a tragic dilemma: that because loyalty is justified by the goodness of its object, hypocrisy requires believers to sacrifice either their conscience (to remain loyal) or their character and identity (by abandoning their loyalty). This article presents philosophical and theological reasons that both arguments are unpersuasive.

According to theistic consubstantialism, the universe and God are essentially made of the same stuff. If theistic consubstantialism is correct, then God possesses the essential power to have knowledge de se of the contents of the mind of every conscious being internal to God. If theistic consubstantialism is false, then God lacks this essential property. So either God is essentially corporeal and possesses greater essential epistemic powers than God would have otherwise or God is essentially incorporeal and has a diminished range of essential epistemic powers. In light of this dilemma, I argue that theists should accept theistic consubstantialism.