Posthumanism in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges

Notes to Contributors. Preface. Part I: Attacks on Religious Belief:. 1. Is Evil Evidence against Belief in God?. Evil Is Evidence against Theistic Belief: William L. Rowe (Purdue University). Evil Does Not Make Atheism More Reasonable than Theism: Daniel Howard--Snyder (Western Washington University) and Michael Bergmann (Purdue University). Reply to Howard--Snyder and Bergmann. Reply to Rowe. 2. Does Divine Hiddenness Justify Atheism?. Divine Hiddenness Justifies Atheism: J. L. Schellenberg (Mount Saint Vincent University). Divine Hiddenness Does Not Justify Atheism: Paul K. Moser (Loyola University, Chicago). Reply to Moser. Reply to Schellenberg. 3. Does Science Discredit Religion?. Science Discredits Religion: John Worrall (London School of Economics). The Demise of Religion: Greatly Exaggerated Reports from the Science/Religion Wars: Del Ratzsch (Calvin College). Reply to Ratzsch. Replay to Worrall. Part II: Arguments for Religious Belief:. 4. Is God's Existence the Best Explanation of the Universe?. Explanation and the Cosmological Argument: Bruce R. Reichenbach (Augsburg College). Why Traditional Cosmological Arguments Don't Work, and a Sketch of a New One that Does: Richard Gale (University of Pittsburgh). Reply to Gale. Reply to Reichenbach. 5. Does Religious Experience Justify Religious Belief?. Religious Experience Justifies Religious Belief: William P. Alston (Syracuse University). Do Mystics See God?: Evan Fales (University of Iowa). Reply to Fales. Reply to Alston. 6. Is It Rational for Christians to Believe in the Resurrection?. It Is Rational to Believe in the Resurrection: Stephen T. Davis (Claremont McKenna College). It Is Not Rational to Believer in the Resurrection: Michael Martin (Boston University). Reply to Martin. Reply to Davis. Part III: Issues within Religion:. 7. Can Only One Religion Be True?. How to Sink in Cognitive Quicksand: Nuancing Religious Pluralism: Keith E. Yandell (University of Wisconsin). It Is Not Reasonable to Believer that Only One Religion is True: Peter Byrne (King's College, University of London). Reply to Byrne. Reply to Yandell. 8. Does God Take Risks in Governing the World?. God Takes Risks: William Hasker (Huntington College). God Does Not Take Risks: Paul Helm (Regent College). Reply to Helm. Reply to Hasker. 9. Does God Respond to Petitionary Prayer?. God Responds to Prayer: Michael J. Murray (Franklin and Marshall College). God Does Not Necessarily Respond to Prayer: David Basinger (Roberts Wesleyan College). Reply to Basinger. Reply to Murray. 10. Is Eternal Damnation Compatible with the Christian Concept of God?. Eternal Hell and the Christian Concept of God: Jerry Walls (Asbury Theological Seminary). No Hell: Thomas Talbott (Willamette University). Reply to Talbott. Reply to Walls. 11. Is Morality Based on God's Commands?. Divine Commands Are the Foundation of Morality: Janine Marie Idziak (Loras College). Ethics Is Based on Natural Law: Craig A. Boyd (Greenville College) and Raymond J. VanArragon (Asbury College). Reply to Boyd and VanArragon. Reply to Idziak. 12. Should a Christian Be a Mind--Body Dualist?. Christians Should Affirm Mind--Body Dualism: Dean W. Zimmerman (Rutgers University). Christians Should Reject Mind--Body Dualism: Lynne Rudder Baker (University of Massachusetts). Reply to Baker. Reply to Zimmerman. Index

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

Reviewed by: The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature by Karen Coats Lara Saguisag (bio) Karen Coats. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Students, educators, and scholars who are seeking comprehensive and accessible critical introductions to the study of children's and young adult literature have a few notable titles to choose from. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer's The Pleasures of Children's Literature, originally published in 1991 with a third edition released in 2003, remains an essential introductory handbook on children's literature studies. In the more recent Reading Children's Literature: A Critical Introduction (2013), Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella cover a wide variety of forms, genres, and themes and skillfully guide readers in using the lens of age, race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and ability to arrive at nuanced readings of texts for young people. It seems fair to expect that a new critical introduction to children's literature studies not only match the scope and accessibility of existing titles but also offer new perspectives and content. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature by Karen Coats undoubtedly meets these expectations. This thoughtfully organized, wide-ranging, and innovative book draws from cultural studies, literary studies, and child development studies in its consideration of diverse forms and genres. Chapter 1 deftly illustrates how knowledge of the histories of ideologies of childhood is fundamental to understanding the histories of literature for young people. Chapter 3 works to demystify literary theory, assuring readers that "we are always already theorists" (84); framed by an anecdote in which a teenaged girl and her friends dissect her conversation with her crush, the chapter covers a variety of theoretical paradigms including formalism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, and reader response criticism. Other chapters provide substantial discussions of poetry, picture books, films, folk narratives, nonfiction, realistic fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Each chapter is supplemented by case studies, prompts for writing and discussion, and suggestions for further reading, including Internet sources. These supplements will likely be effective in generating vibrant classroom discussions, increasing student engagement, and helping emerging scholars become confident, independent researchers. The volume is primarily addressed to undergraduate and graduate students, but it will also appeal to educators who are looking for creative approaches to structuring and enlivening their courses as well as experienced scholars who are committed to keeping pace with contemporary debates that are animating children's and young adult literature studies. I do wish that chapter 6, which discusses images in children's literature, did more to clarify the differences between various visual-verbal narrative forms. The chapter certainly enables readers to develop a vocabulary to discuss [End Page 147] pictures in texts for young people. It historicizes the functions of illustrations in children's books and shows how attention to visual elements as well as issues of production and audience can yield varied and rich interpretations of visual-verbal narratives. But some discussion of, say, the different ideological frameworks and histories of picture books and comics may be necessary to illustrate the complex ways pictures in visual-verbal narratives for young people are apprehended by readers across time and culture. As the whole, the book instructs readers to be responsible, inquisitive scholars. And it does so in such an openhearted manner. In her introduction to the volume, the author provides a short biography and invites readers to "call her Karen" (5). As such, Karen not only models the practice of acknowledging one's cultural position; she also deliberately establishes a tone of affability, demonstrating that an intimate, personal approach is not necessarily incompatible with meaningful scholarship. In the final chapter, Karen invites new scholars to "[enter] the professional conversation," providing comprehensive lists of journals and professional associations as well as advice on research, writing, and disseminating one's work. Throughout the book, Karen cracks jokes, shares personal anecdotes, acknowledges questions she continues to wrestle with, and urges readers to disagree with and complicate the points that she makes. In short, she displays how pleasure, uncertainty, and exchange of knowledge are part and parcel of the practice of scholarship. Bloomsbury Introduction pays attention to recent trends in children's...

This work explores the intricate connection between contemporary philosophical debates in the ethics of technology and speculative fiction through the analysis of the novel Machines Like Me (2019) by British author Ian McEwan. In line with McEwan’s continued literary interest in the intersection of science, morality, and ethics, this novel scrutinises the moral complexities that emerge from the encounter of humans with a technological other. Following the postphenomenological and relational ethical approaches of Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh that overtly align with posthumanist thought, the article reassesses the moral dilemmas that emerge when a conscious nonhuman other challenges traditional ethical codes and the core of humanist moral ascription.

Despite growing interest in father engagement in contemporary social work, historical knowledge about how fathers were represented within early welfare practice remains limited. This article offers an original empirical analysis of 36 archival social work case files produced in the Jewish Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s–1940s, constituting the first systematic study of professional documentation written by early trained social workers in this context. Situating the Yishuv within the broader transnational circulation of social work knowledge between Central Europe and Palestine, the article examines how professional discourses, institutional routines, and socio-political conditions shaped paternal roles.Contrary to widespread assumptions that fathers were largely absent or marginalized in early welfare systems, the findings reveal a more complex reality. Fathers appear frequently in the files and are often described with attentiveness, empathy, and recognition of their involvement in family life. While paternal authority continued to be framed through breadwinning and disciplinary expectations, professional flexibility emerged in situations of poverty, migration, and crisis, where fathers were acknowledged as emotionally vulnerable subjects rather than solely as moral or economic actors.This pattern invites reflection not only on evolving attitudes toward fatherhood, but also on gendered asymmetries embedded in welfare practice. Fathers’ difficulties were often interpreted as circumstantial and structurally conditioned, whereas maternal shortcomings were more readily moralized and individualized. Rather than presenting a linear narrative of professional progress or failure, the analysis highlights the complex ways gendered care roles were negotiated within early social work institutions. By integrating historical insight into contemporary debates on parental engagement, this study deepens understanding of how institutional practices have long shaped notions of family, responsibility, and gender.

A resource guide for practice development through technology

Mechanism of salt effect on flavor formation in lightly-salted large yellow croaker by integrated multiple intelligent sensory and untargeted lipidomics analyses

The epistomology of the definition of number and the philosophical foundation of arithmetic based on a comparison between Gottlob Frege's logicism and Platonic philosophy (Syrianus, Theo Smyrnaeus, and others). The intention of this article is to provide arithmetic with a logically and methodologically valid definition of number for construing a consistent philosophical foundation of arithmetic. The – surely astonishing – main thesis is that instead of the modern and contemporary attempts, especially in Gottlob Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic, such a definition is found in the arithmetic in Euclid's Elements. To draw this conclusion a profound reflection on the role of epistemology for the foundation of mathematics, especially for the method of definition of number, is indispensable; a reflection not to be found in the contemporary debate (the predominate ‘pragmaticformalism’ in current mathematics just shirks from trying to solve the epistemological problems raised by the debate between logicism, intuitionism, and formalism). Frege's definition of number, ‘The number of the concept F is the extension of the concept ‘numerically equal to the concept F”, which is still substantial for contemporary mathematics, does not fulfil the requirements of logical and methodological correctness because the definiens in a double way (in the concepts ‘extension of a concept’ and ‘numerically equal’) implicitly presupposes the definiendum, i.e. number itself. Number itself, on the contrary, is defined adequately by Euclid as ‘multitude composed of units’, a definition which is even, though never mentioned, an implicit presupposition of the modern concept ofset. But Frege rejects this definition and construes his own - for epistemological reasons: Frege's definition exactly fits the needs of modern epistemology, namely that for to know something like the number of a concept one must become conscious of a multitude of acts of producing units of ‘given’ representations under the condition of a 1:1 relationship to obtain between the acts of counting and the counted ‘objects’. According to this view, which has existed at least since the Renaissance stoicism and is maintained not only by Frege but also by Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Dummett, and others, there is no such thing as a number of pure units itself because the intellect or pure reason, by itself empty, must become conscious of different units of representation in order to know a multitude, a condition not fulfilled by Euclid's conception. As this is Frege's main reason to reject Euclid's definition of number (others are discussed in detail), the paper shows that the epistemological reflection in Neoplatonic mathematical philosophy, which agrees with Euclid's definition of number, provides a consistent basement for it. Therefore it is not progress in the history of science which hasled to the a poretic contemporary state of affairs but an arbitrary change of epistemology in early modern times, which is of great influence even today.

Borges and Bruno Schulz on the Infinite Book of the Kabbalah Rolando Pérez 22°06'39'N 78°37'40'W 41°21'32'N 2°5'57.9'E 40°44'54.36'N, 73°59'8.36'W …simetrías en el tiempo (3 de septiembre, tercer mes del año), simetrías en el espacio (3 lugares) … un destino por descifrar “Hypertextuality” may be a new term, a product of the Internet, but the reality of it goes back thousands of years. Religious and literary texts always established wittingly or unwittingly transversal connections with other texts within and outside of their own cultures and traditions. And fortunately for us, the by now exhausted literary concept of influence has given way to the notion of confluence: the ways in which texts flow into each other in a process of mutual enrichment. The aim of this article, then, is to present the philosophical confluence of some of the ideas of the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and the Polish writer, Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). Certainly I am not the first to connect them in a general way with respect to their interests in metaphysics and mysticism. Susan Sontag did so when she referred to Yugoslavian writer, Danilo Kiš’ acknowledge affinities with both writers (Kiš xi, 267). But no one until now has offered a detailed exposition of their ideas, and the impact these ideas had on their work. For the scholar of Hispanic letters, an introduction to Borges is unnecessary. However, the same cannot be said of Bruno Schulz, whose work was relatively unknown in the Spanish language until the publication of his Obra completa (1993).1 [End Page 41] Schulz was born at the end of the nineteenth century in the sleepy town of Drohobycz in the region of Galicia—a region which changed hands several times throughout its history: first Polish, then German and Russian, and today Ukrainian. Like Galicia, whose identity kept shifting with changes in geopolitical power, Schulz’s identity seems to have been quite as liquid, as he, along with other Galicians, had to adjust to the whims of political power. Born into a Jewish family of textile merchants, Schulz was fascinated by Jewish (mystical) culture; he wrote in Polish, knew German, and had no knowledge of Yiddish. He studied architecture, and earned his living as a high school teacher of arts and crafts. In terms of his writing, his complete works include two works of prose fiction, The Street of Crocodiles [La calle de los cocodrilos] and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass [Sanatorio bajo la Clepsidra], and some brief essays and letters. His life came to a terribly tragic end one day in 1942 when a Gestapo officer executed him in the street, for the simple reason of being a Jew: in the wrong place, at the wrong time, almost in a manner that recalls Borges’ “brújula” pointing to a death foretold in a book that needs to be deciphered. And that is not surprising, since both writers conceived of the world as a union of materiality (the body: mortality) and spirit (the Word: eternity), and both writers had profound interests in the the Kabbalah. “Yo afirmo que la Biblioteca es interminable,” declares the narrator of Borges’ “La biblioteca de Babel” (1989 I 465). While humans, as interpreters-librarians, are imperfect mortal beings, the library itself is eternal. “La Biblioteca existe ab aeterno…No me parece inverosímil que en algún anaquel del universo haya un libro total…” writes Borges (466, 469 emphasis in the original). And when Joseph, the protagonist of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is given a “book” by his Father, he reproaches his father for trying to fool him with a reproduction of The Book. “‘You must know, Father,’ I cried, ‘you must. Don’t pretend, don’t quibble. This book has given you away. Why do you give me that fake copy, that reproduction, a clumsy falsification? What have you done with The Book?” (1978 3). The son wants to know what the Father has done with The Book, because the book he has been given...

Teaching to Read as an OutsiderHow I Created and Taught an Introductory Course on Indigenous Literatures in Quebec Marie-Hélène Jeannotte (bio) In 2009, when discussing the new course I was about to give on Indigenous literatures in Quebec, I was often met with doubtful questions: "But what books will you teach? Which authors? Is it really a literature?" A few years earlier, at the turn of the 2000s, Maurizio Gatti, one of the first researchers to study Indigenous literatures in French, faced similar disbelief from an employee at the Quebec documentation center in Paris, but also from the majority of professors he approached to supervise his PhD, some of them even challenging the very existence of Indigenous literatures (Littérature 18). At that time, Indigenous books in French were both rare and largely ignored. Librarians and other book professionals viewed Indigenous texts as purely ethnological (Gatti, Littérature 17–19). Unlike Indigenous literatures in English, which, back in 2009, were already well established in English Canada, Indigenous literatures in French in Quebec were then still absent from the literary field. As Isabelle St-Amand states, Si les littératures autochtones sont relativement bien établies au Canada anglais, il en va autrement dans le cas du Québec, où le statut de la littérature autochtone fait toujours l'objet de discussions. … [L]es œuvres des écrivains autochtones sont peu enseignées dans les universités et peu de discours critiques ont été élaborés sur la question.1 Indeed, Indigenous literatures were missing from university literary studies curricula in Quebec in the first decade of the 2000s. Indigenous literatures in French were taught in Ontario (Gatti, Être écrivain 180) and at Laval University's Department of Anthropology (Gagné 227). In 2008, the need to establish the legitimacy of these literatures in [End Page 135] academia and research but also within a curriculum convinced me to propose the creation of a course entirely dedicated to Indigenous literatures from Quebec to the University of Sherbrooke, the Francophone university where I was an MA student. I designed the course as an introduction to Indigenous literatures in French (or in French translation) in Quebec, including oral tradition and contemporary works. The course was offered for the first time in 2009. According to Gatti (Être écrivain 180) and Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui (5), it was the first Indigenous literatures course in French to officially be included in a Quebec university literary studies' curriculum. I have taught this class often since, updating and expanding it as Indigenous literatures in Quebec achieve wider and wider recognition. While none of my students had ever read an Indigenous work—nor could name an Indigenous writer—at the beginning of our first semester in 2009, the situation is the opposite today. Students who have never read a literary work by an Indigenous author are now in the minority. In this article, I wish to share and reflect upon my experience as a non-Indigenous teacher creating an introductory course in a literature department where Indigenous works were, back in 2009, practically unknown. I do not present this particular course as a model to follow. On the contrary, my intention is to describe the context within which the course was created, as well as the challenges, issues raised, and missteps made along the way. Having now taught this course several times over a decade, I wish to detail its evolution as well as that of its academic context, and of myself as a teacher. As well, I propose to explore questions that will be of interest to non-Indigenous scholars setting out to teach Indigenous literatures. As a teacher, how can I establish the legitimacy of Indigenous literatures? How can I equip students to read, interpret, and analyze works by First Nations authors when basic knowledge of Indigenous cultures is often lacking? How can I help students gain more awareness of their biases? I will share here a few avenues for reflection that have proved useful over these past thirteen years, all of which stem from fostering a sense of humility, listening, and empathy. filling a gap I came to Indigenous Studies through literature and specifically the...

Non-thermal plasma (NTP) is regarded as a potential application for environmental pollution control due to its ability to remove pollutants. As a major precursor of dioxins, the influence of the parameters of 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene (TCB) decomposition using NTP technology was investigated through a series of experiments, including voltage, frequency, water content, initial concentration, flow rate, and oxygen content. The experimental results show that the energy injected into the NTP system has a positive correlation to voltage and frequency. Oxygen has the greatest influence on TCB decomposition. The optimal reaction condition was at 15 kV, 1000 Hz, an initial concentration of 20 mg m−3, a flow rate of 2 l min−1, H2O at 4%, and O2 at 0%. Under this condition, the TCB removal efficiency could reach 92%. According to the generated product backstepping, the hydroxyl radical (·OH) plays an important role in TCB decomposition due to its strong oxidation, which participates in the dechlorination and oxidation reactions as free radicals, and the possible decomposition pathway of TCB by NTP is inferred from the identified by-products. It is of great significance to investigate the influence of the parameters of TCB decomposition using NTP technology in order to provide references for industrial application.

Generally a distinction is made between the disclosure of personal information and the disclosure of countertransference feelings to a patient. While this may be a necessary distinction to make in the interest of carrying on a coherent conversation on this question, I argue that there is sort of vanishing point where the difference between “facts” and “feelings” merges. What I wish to suggest here is that, to a certain and necessary degree, the context and the framing of the question of self-disclosure determines what we define as a disclosure. I propose that thinking about a dialectical relationship between sameness and difference is a particularly useful way into the question of self-disclosures in contemporary clinical work. The question of disclosing personal information to patients became a pressing one for me when I found that in some cases if felt necessary to disclose my HIV seropositive status. Here is an example of a fact that is particularly laden with feelings, confounding the distinction between a factual and a countertransferential disclosure. As might be expected in considering the disclosure of personal medical information, I felt there were a variety of reasons to do so, each with a specific context. In a long psychotherapy treatment with an HIV-negative man I found that tracking each of our senses of sameness and difference offered a way of understanding the changing meanings of the disclosure of my HIV seropositivity. But more importantly it became clear that it was the process of disclosure rather than the content that exerted the greatest influence on our work, ultimately contributing to a transformative experience for the patient.

In recent decades, numerous Latin American artists and theorists have invited their readers to see Western Civilization and the story of its elaboration from below, that is to say, from the global South. Publications that challenged representations of history and cultural encounters appeared worldwide around the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage. Others have considered Latin American economies and societies in light of globalization, as Latin American political and economic elites embraced neo-liberalism in the latter decades of the twentieth century. And as the last century closed, increasing numbers of working-class Latin Americans questioned neo-liberal policies, challenging them in elections, social movements, and popular protests that thrust debates into public view from Chiapas, Mexico, to southern Chile. In this socio-political context, creative literary works, as well as theoretical studies in the social sciences, have examined a history of colonization and economic injustice for diverse communities in Latin America. A key aspect of popular protests and literary works has lately included an interrogation of environmental questions: land and water use, resource exploitation and depletion, crises of human and ecological health. Faced with environmental, social, and economic transformations on a massive scale in an era of global exchange, authors like Tatiana Lobo (Costa Rica), Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), Homero Aridjis (Mexico), and Luis Sepulveda (Chile) have considered how processes of economic change have transformed landscapes and affected human relationships with the non-human world in Latin America. In this study on ecology, coloniality, and modernity, I bring together scholarship from Latin American social scientists and from ecocriticism to consider two literary texts from Argentina: La tierra del fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion by Libertad Demitropulos. (1) Both La tierra del fuego and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion were penned by well-known Argentine writers, and each author has garnered an international audience for her texts. Iparraguirre won several prizes for La tierra del fuego in particular, including the prestigious Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize in 2000. Demitropulos has also been recognized as an accomplished writer, having published numerous works before her death in 1998. Despite the international reputation of the authors, though, there have been very few scholarly studies published on their novels, either in Latin America or abroad. The few publications on La tierra del fuego have focused on the challenges it presents to official histories, a line of criticism closely tied to the production of post-dictatorial fiction in Latin America. (2) Of Un piano en Bahia Desolacion, I know of no scholarly studies at all, though there have been some published on Demitropulos's other works, particularly Rio de congojas. Both La tierra del fuego and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion can be situated broadly within the context of post-dictatorial fiction. In general, this fiction challenges the construction of history and memory in the wake of the trauma of dictatorship. The two novels considered here reach beyond recent crises to recover the memory of a marginalized Argentine landscape. In particular, they speak to the presence of the ecological and cultural diversity in Argentina that fell to an advancing capitalist frontier in the nineteenth century. The novels make explicit connections between human and environmental casualties of a new world order that took shape in an era of European colonialism and Latin American nation-formation. The novels also posit a retreat from modernity that is particularly significant in light of the context of the composition and publication of the texts. My reading of the novels shows how these contemporary works depict the great transformation and crisis of Latin American environments and indigenous societies in the nineteenth century. …

After recounting several dreams and related alchemical interests of Jung's tied to the 17(th) century, a contextualizing look at select scientific and philosophical developments of that century is presented. Several precursors of the contemporary debates on the mind/body relation are noted, with special reference to the work of Antonio Damasio. This in turn leads to a reconsideration of the work of the 17(th) century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which Jung read as a major precursor to his formulation of synchronicity (via Leibniz's concept of 'pre-established harmony'). Leibniz was the first philosopher to articulate the mind/body relationship in terms of supervenience, sharing an accord with those contemporary philosophers and scientists who see the mind as being an emergent property of the body-brain. Similarly, these ideas are also consistent with a reformulation of synchronicity in terms of emergence. Tracing Leibniz's interest in China reveals another set of links to Jung and to emergentism. Jung's use of Taoist concepts in developing the synchronicity principle is well known. According to scholars, Leibniz was the first major Western intellect to study the I-Ching, through the assistance of a Jesuit missionary in Beijing, Fr. Joachim Bouvet. Some details of the Leibniz-Bouvet correspondence are discussed here. Despite Helmut Wilhelm's presenting aspects of this correspondence at an Eranos conference, Jung does not appear to have integrated it into his writing on synchronicity--a possible reason for this omission is suggested.

Every critic who writes about Zunz (1) points out that Emma is one of Borges's rare female protagonists; that hers is a detective story but lacks a detective, and that, despite the fact that Emma's crime is resolved, the story is unfathomable. Rarely mentioned is that Zunz reworks one of Borges's favorite story models, a narrative whose the protagonist invents a plot in which he or she has not only a principal but often a tragic role. That plot reduces a life of infinite possibilities to a straight line leading to disaster. This process is enacted in muerte y la brujula, in which Erik Lonnrot, an overly inventive detective, constructs a rabbinical solution to the murder of a rabbi, enabling his antagonist, Red Scharlach, to ensnare him in his own plot--a clever rewriting of Lonnrot's interpretation. In El jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan, Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy working for the Germans during World War I, must tell the Germans to attack a city named Albert. To do so, he murders a man with the same name, is arrested, and has his name linked with his victim's in the news. Prior to their decision to transform life into plot, these characters, like Emma lead lives composed of random events beyond their control. By imposing a plot on their lives, they act the role of fate with regard to their own existence and ironically turn into fictions within fictions. Also typical of Borges (and re-enacted in Zunz) is the plot's need for blood. This sacrifice in Zunz is double and reminds us how the artist must sacrifice life for the sake of art: Murder and suicide are images of each other. The ultimate literary source for Borges's master plot, as Efrain Kistal (2) has suggested, is Guillaume Apollinaire's tale El marinero de Amsterdam, which Borges and Bioy Casares translated and included in their 1943 anthology Los mejores cuentos policiales. (The story disappears from subsequent editions of the collection, as if Borges wished to cover his tracks, though in his 1946 essay paradoja de Apollinaire we see he still respects the avant-garde poet while disdaining the avant-garde.) Zunz, like muerte y la brujula is nominally a story of revenge: On January 14, 1922, Emma who lives in Buenos Aires, receives a letter from Brazil informing her that her father, referred to as Mr. Maier, died from taking an overdose of Veronal, the commercial name for barbital, a sleep-inducing drug. The ambiguous name of the letter's author is either Fein or Fain, as if the narrator, momentarily assuming the role of reporter, had only heard a version of it: If he had seen the letter, he would know if it was signed Fein or Fain. Despite this curious ploy, the narrator is able to paraphrase the letter, in which Fein/Fain informs Emma that, sehor Maier habia ingerido por error una fuerte dosis de veronal y habia fallecido el tres del corriente en el hospital de Bage. (69) In spoken Spanish, there would be no difference between Fein and Fain, just as there is no difference between Ginzburg and Ginsburg in muerte y la brujula, so the reader is alerted to the problematic existence of homophones--words that sound alike but which are visually different. We are advised to distrust what we hear, though this caution soon extends to all sensory perception, especially vision. Borges, especially after his 1940 introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares's novella La invencion de Morel, with its hilarious attacks on Dostoevski, Proust, and Joss Ortega y Gasset, was a declared enemy of literary realism, psychologically true-to-life characters, and the novel. But in Zunz, his narrator meticulously enumerates, in novelistic fashion, Emma's sensations on reading the letter from Fein/Fain: malestar en el vientre y en las rodillas; luego de ciega culpa, de irrealidad, de frio, de temor; luego, quiso ya estar en el dia siguiente. Acto continuo comprendio que esa voluntad era inutil porque la muerte de su padre era lo unico que habia sucedido en el mundo, y seguiria sucediendo sin fin. …