Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.”

EDWARD L. SCHIEFFELIN: From The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers

While some anthropologists have called for a new 'public' or 'engaged' anthropology, profound changes have already occurred, leading to new kinds of work for many anthropologists. The papers in this volume show that anthropology is put to work in diverse ways today.

Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be in games and what to care about; they designate the player's in-game abilities and motivations. In other words, designers create alternate agencies, and players submerge themselves in those agencies. Games let us explore alternate forms of agency. The fact that we play games demonstrates something remarkable about the nature of our own agency: we are capable of incredible fluidity with our own motivations and rationality. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and the fact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication. They are the technology that allows us to write down and transmit forms of agency. Thus, the body of games forms a "library of agency" which we can use to help develop our freedom and autonomy. Nguyen also presents a new theory of the aesthetics of games. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. They are unlike traditional artworks in that they are designed to sculpt activities - and to promote their players' aesthetic appreciation of their own activity.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester

Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank. Translations EUTHYPHRO APOLOGY CRITO HIPPIAS MAJOR HIPPIAS MINOR FIRST ALCIBIADES CHARMIDES LACHES LYSIS ION PHAEDO CRATYLUS EUTHYDEMUS PROTAGORAS GORGIAS MENO MENEXENUS SYMPOSIUM THE REPUBLIC PHAEDRUS PARMENIDES THEAETETUS CLITOPHON TIMAEUS CRITIAS SOPHIST STATESMAN PHILEBUS LAWS The Spurious Works SECOND ALCIBIADES HIPPARCHUS THE RIVAL LOVERS THEAGES MINOS EPINOMIS SISYPHUS AXIOCHUS DEMODOCUS ERYXIAS HALCYON ON JUSTICE ON VIRTUE DEFINITIONS EPIGRAMS The Epistles The Criticism PLATO AND PLATONISM by Walter Horatio Pater INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY AND WRITINGS OF PLATO by Thomas Taylor Extract from ‘REPRESENTATIVE MEN’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson PLATO: LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT TEACHERS by Elbert Hubbard The Biographies PLATO: LIVES OF THE EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS by Diogenes Laertius THE LIFE OF PLATO by Hesychius of Miletus THE LIFE OF PLATO by Olympiodorus

In his Symposium, Plato crafted speeches in praise of love that has influenced writers and artists from antiquity to the present. But questions remain concerning the meaning of specific features, the significance of the dialogue as a whole, and the character of its influence. Here, an international team of scholars addresses such questions.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Business and the American Petroleum Institute collaborated in the preparation and presentation of the symposium in Nov. 1959.

Slavery and the American South Edited by Winthrop D. Jordan With essays and commentaries by Roger D. Abrahams, William Dusinberre, Laura F. Edwards, Annette Gordon-Reed, Ariela Gross, Walter Johnson, Norrece T. Jones, Jr., Jan Lewis, James Oakes, Robert Olwell, Peter S. Onuf, and Sterling Stuckey. In 1900 very few historians were exploring the institution of slavery in the South. But in the next half century the culture of slavery became a dominating theme in Southern historiography. In the 1970s it was the subject of the first Chancellor's Symposium in Southern History held at the University of Mississippi. Since then, scholarly interest in slavery has proliferated ever more widely. In fact, the editor of this retrospective volume states that since the 1970s "the expansion has resulted in a corpus that has a huge number of components--scores, even hundreds, rather than mere dozens." He states that "no such gathering could possibly summarize all the changes of those twenty-five years." Hence, for the Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History in the year 2000, instead of providing historical summary, the participants were invited to formulate thoughts arising from their own special interests and experiences. Each paper was complemented by a learned, penetrating reaction. In this excellent collection of historical essays and commentaries, noted historians develop and sustain an engaging and provocative series of historical arguments about slavery in the American South. The collection of papers includes the following: "Logic and Experience: Thomas Jefferson's Life in the Law" by Annette Gordon-Reed, with commentary by Peter S. Onuf; "The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery" by James Oakes, with commentary by Walter Johnson; "Reflections on Law, Culture, and Slavery" by Ariela Gross, with commentary by Laura F. Edwards; "Rape in Black and White: Sexual Violence in the Testimony of Enslaved and Free Americans" by Norrece T. Jones, Jr., with commentary by Jan Lewis; "The Long History of a Low Place: Slavery on the South Carolina Coast, 1670-1870" by Robert Olwell, with commentary by William Dusinberre; "Paul Robeson and Richard Wright on the Arts and Slave Culture" by Sterling Stuckey, with commentary by Roger D. Abrahams. Winthrop D. Jordan (deceased) was William F. Winter Professor of History and Professor of African American Studies at the University of Mississippi.