This paper examines changes in the philosophical and literary representations of mirrors—and mirroring—in a foundational period of Chinese history beginning with the pre-classical period and ending in the medieval Tang Dynasty. Inspired by the peculiarity of this object, which acts upon subjects at least as much as it is acted upon by them, this study of the literary mirror, of reflection and reflexivity, provides a glimpse into the larger issue of the construction of subjectivity in premodern China. Through the examination of each stage of the literary mirror’s gradual transformation from metaphor, to lyrical stimulus, and ultimately to its subsumption as an evocative predicate, it is possible to observe concomitant shifts in the construction of the literary subject as it displays increasing—but never absolute—degrees of specificity, distinctness, and autonomy.

Why exactly did Blaise Pascal carry with him the testimony of a life-transforming religious experience written in two slightly different versions and hidden in the lining of his coat? By tracing the unease with which this question has been met—or most often, dodged—by 350 years’ worth of readers, this essay argues that Pascal’s so-called Mémorial still today presents us with the necessity to rethink the commemorative and transformative function of texts in general.

Comparing nineteenth-century British and Australian Anglo-Saxonist literature enables a “decentered” exploration of Anglo-Saxonism’s intersections with national, imperial, and colonial discourses, challenging assumptions that this discourse was an uncritical vehicle of English nationalism and British manifest destiny. Far from reflecting a stable imperial center, evocations of “ancient Englishness” in British literature were polyvalent and self-contesting, while in Australian literature they offered a response to colonization and emerging knowledge about the vast age of Indigenous Australian cultures.

Rooted in the history of the representation of benzene, this paper examines the evolution of nanoaesthetics from the 1985 discovery of buckminsterfullerene forward, including the aesthetics of molecular machines and scanning probe microscopy (SPM). It highlights buckminsterfullerene's Platonic aesthetics, the aesthetic relationship of nanocars and molecular switches to Boyle's seventeenth-century mechanistic philosophy and twentieth-century machine aesthetics, and the photographic aesthetics of SPM.

George Lakoff’s academic specialty, cognitive linguistics, applies to politics in general; he discusses its special relevance when political issues threaten our universities.

This article addresses the association between death and fossils that Buffon developed across the thirty-six volumes of his Histoire naturelle and its implications for his literary project. Through a study of the connections between Buffon's physiological theory of death, his fable of the first man, his anthropological treatment of funeral rites among non-European peoples, his statistical studies of life expectancy, and his personalized discussion of fossils at the end of his life, I argue that over the course of Buffon's career the imaginative trope connecting death to ossification and petrification shaped both his natural philosophy and his literary project. This trope found its richest expression in Buffon's last work, the Histoire naturelle des minéraux, which I interpret as his testament.

This essay traces Biblical resonances within Machiavelli's account of Cesare Borgia, or “Duke Valentino,” in The Prince. It challenges the idea that Machiavelli's goal is to detheologize politics (in fact, my reading suggests that the founding of all principalities must be consecrated in religious terms); it dispels the notion that the “armed prophet” is armed exclusively with a sword rather than with a book; and it raises questions concerning the ambiguous meaning of “success” in a practical “how-to” manual on political success. I demonstrate that Machiavelli's intentions are not necessarily so antireligious, or even so anti-Christian, as interpreters conventionally present the Florentine's views on religion. Most fundamentally, perhaps, my interpretation prompts readers to reimagine what, on Machiavelli's view, a genuinely political founder of a Christian polity might look like.