... Wong, Miguel Tamen, Natalie Zemon Davis, John L. Flood, Randolph Starn, G. Thomas Tanselle INTRODUCTION: SETTING LIMITS “Take it back,” Stephen Toulmin urged intellectuals, on behalf of the editorial board, as Common Knowledge began its...

...Caroline Walker Bynum; Jeffrey F. Hamburger; William P. Caferro; Linda Safran; Adam S. Cohen; Kathryn Kremnitzer; Siddhartha V. Shah; Wenrui Zhao; Lynn Hunt; Elizabeth Heineman; William J. Simpson; Youval Rotman Caroline Bynum describes the rationale behind a second set of case studies...

... at” (acknowledge) things, some things bow back at me, and I must treat whatever bows back as if it were like me. Unlike James Lovelock, a passage from whose work they discuss, Hache and Latour understand this picture in a sense that is essentially “honorary.” The picture or premise they propose sets up, they admit...

...Yaakov A. Mascetti Abstract In the second installment of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation,” Donne's religious poetry is set in dialogue not only with the “Great Controversy” of the 1560s over the nature of the eucharistic sign but also with pre...

...Caroline Walker Bynum; Mary Harvey Doyno; Dorothea von Mücke; Frederick S. Paxton; Ramona Naddaff; Katharine Wallerstein The historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who solicited and organized this set of five case studies, explains in her introduction to them that their intent is to bypass the currently...

...Frederick S. Paxton A contribution to a set of case studies, titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this essay describes a course on the deep history of Italy developed for a “semester abroad” program in Perugia during the spring of 2016. It describes, in particular, two class meetings in the middle...

... past. It blurs agency and overwhelming structural inequality. It is a set of categories that people define for themselves and that, at the same time, others — strangers, neighbors, government officials — relentlessly impose upon them. For four hundred years, the meaning of racial categories in North...

...Colin Richmond In the context of an issue of Common Knowledge dedicated to instances of experimental scholarship and to discussion of them, this contribution by a social historian of medieval England sets out to demonstrate that an empirical alternative to tendentious and interpretive...

... definitions. But universities also have an obligation to teach the young and to do so within the context of a common set of values that both determines the setting in which teaching takes place and encourages students to develop values that will shape their own lives. Katz argues in particular...

... to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things and data self-contained and static...

...Lilith Acadia In a contribution to a symposium on xenophilia, this essay — a study of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations — raises the question of whether all xenophilia is by nature doomed to fail. Set in Ireland in 1833, the drama centers on the tension arising from a young British lieutenant’s...

... “Aristotelian, bivalent logic” in favor of a “fuzzy logic” based on Zadeh's “fuzzy set theory.” This introductory piece relates these theoretical works of the past half-century to the sorites paradox and to classical issues of vagueness raised and still unresolved in Western philosophy. Returning then to Rorty...

... hundred percent of GDP in individual debt in 2008, the real Faustian bargain was not a “enjoy now, pay later” scheme for “glitzy, short-term junk.” The truth is much scarier, and points toward a different set of cultural and theological references than the ones Atwood investigates. The dividing line...

... many decades of provincial Stalinism, Havel brought Czech history back to the path of greatness on which T. G. Masaryk had set it in the first part of the twentieth century. © 2012 by Adam Michnik 2012 Column WHEN...

... and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable...

... and practices are entirely transformative not only of their futures but also of their pasts. Benjamin argued that a work of art is a set of potentials that may or may not be realized in the vicissitudes of its afterlife. The true significance of works might be said, therefore, to emerge only after some as-yet...

... in paradigm, whereas a scientist who resists will effectively disappear. Thus, the Morte Darthur set the terms for modern literature in English by holding fast to those of the Middle Ages. This essay argues that Malory was “modern” in that the Morte Darthur would not have been written except for the events...

..., Strathern and Stewart offer transcultural wisdom about conflict resolution, and he lists seven exemplary instances. To this list, he adds a few more of his own, drawn from his reading of works by the ethnographer Rupert Stasch and the historians Rogers Brubaker and Tara Zahra. This set of principles, which...

...Colin Davis The great Roman historian Livy describes a radical attempt at conflict resolution in his version of the story of the Horatii. The warring cities of Rome and Alba agree to settle their differences by pitting two sets of triplets against each other in a battle to the death. Two...