...Joseph Leo Koerner This essay finds its departure point in a title page that Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929) drafted for his lecture on the Pueblo Indians. Through the labyrinthine thought pathways evidenced by this much-amended and overwritten typescript, it explores the relation between reason...

...Matthew Mutter Abstract J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of novels with Jesus in their titles, published between 2013 and 2019, has bewildered many reviewers. This essay review proposes that that bewilderment stems from a misconception of the novels’ allegorical dimension and of the possible meanings evoked...

... that repose might constitute one of life's key desiderata, but notes at the close how both his own view and his interlocutor's are adumbrated in the Wallace Stevens poem that furnishes the dialogue its title. Duke University Press 2009 Symposium: Apology for Quietism, Part 3 The Lack...

...Jeffrey M. Perl; Jeffrey M. Perl This introduction to the third and final part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Unsocial Thought, Uncommon Lives” (13:1 [Winter 2007]: 33–39) is reprinted here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s first twenty-five years. The title...

...Eduardo Viveiros de Castro The article assumes that the expression “comparative relativism”—the title of the Common Knowledge symposium in which the essay appears—is neither tautological nor oxymoronic. Rather, the author construes the term as an apt synthetic characterization of anthropology...

...Dorothea von Mücke This contribution to a set of case studies, titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” focuses on one session of a Columbia University seminar, Aesthetics and Philosophy. The class, comprising a mixed group of undergraduate and graduate students from diverse programs and backgrounds...

..., and he considers as well the pressures generated by the development of online publication. He further tells cautionary tales, from his own experience, that underscore how important it is that the public stewards of scholarship and literature at academic presses not make hasty decisions about what titles...

...Dionigi Albera This essay responds to Jeffrey Perl’s introduction to a long-term project of Common Knowledge titled “Xenophilia: Symposium on Xenophobia’s Contrary.” (Perl’s introduction, “Self-Identity and Ambivalence,” appears in CK 23, no. 2 [May 2017]: 225–31.) Responding to a cue from Perl...

...Linda Safran; Adam S. Cohen This article describes two different sessions taught at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts by Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen as part of a three-year J. Paul Getty Foundation “Connecting Art Histories” initiative titled “Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art...

..., the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled “Between Text and Performance”) emphasize what Roger Moseley calls...

...Barry Allen In this monograph-length article, which inaugurates a multipart symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies,” the significance and virtues of blur are investigated through the whole history of Chinese intellectual tradition. In the Western tradition, the blur of becoming seems to disqualify...

...Ramona Naddaff; Katharine Wallerstein Written for a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution describes an undergraduate course on ancient rhetoric at Berkeley, in which Professor Ramona Naddaff was accused by a male student of demeaning women during a lecture...

...Natalie Zemon Davis; Jeffrey M. Perl Abstract Half of this piece appeared under the title “Postscript on Cultivation: Editorial Note” in Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (spring 2002), and half was written in 2023 by one of the coauthors as a posthumous tribute to the other. The historian Natalie Zemon...

...Colin Richmond The author here extends a dialogue with Jeffrey M. Perl, published in the Spring 2010 issue of Common Knowledge , under the title “`Decorate the Dungeon.'” That dialogue concerns whether Thomas More could have avoided martyrdom though he acted with heroic quietism during...

...Caroline Walker Bynum As part of a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution reports in detail on the initial class taught by the author in the spring of 2015, during her time at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in art history. By presenting students...

...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...

...Terry Eagleton This essay introduces a cluster of articles titled “Devalued Currency: An Elegiac Symposium on Paradigm Shifts.” Eagleton's piece addresses, from a perspective indebted to Walter Benjamin, the notion of Thomas Kuhn that “shifts” in the controlling paradigms of disciplines...

...Michael D. Jackson This memoiristic essay is a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies: On the consequence of blur.” While probing his personal memories and making a case for devaluing our intellectual constructs, the author, an anthropologist, examines paintings...

... between the scientist and the phenomenon she studies. According to Stengers, the comparison, which establishes rapport, is a crucial ingredient in good science. In the context of a symposium titled “Comparative Relativism,” perhaps the crucial point to make about what characterizes Stengers's matter...

...Mary Harvey Doyno As part of a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this essay asks how one can teach college students with little or no exposure to close reading, critical analysis, or the premodern world to read a text written c. 202 CE. An instructor at Sacramento State...