CHL front matter

International Journal of Lexicography, 2024

Pointing the Way to Speech: A Phenomenological Approach to Language, 2020

2021

The front matter of a dictionary provides important information as to the background to a work and what is to be expected inside. Although they can be read as standalone texts, it is only when linked to the actual dictionary content that their full potential is realised. This is very much the case for the prefaces to Furetière’s Dictionnaire Universel, first published posthumously in 1690 and then to go through two major revisions in 1701 and 1725/27. As Furetière left no preface, we start with his factums, texts that details his fight with the Académie Française who wanted to impede publication. We then have the preface by Bayle of 1690 and then the front matter produced by the two revisers, Basnage de Beauval and Brutel de la Rivière. This was a highly innovative dictionary as both an encyclopaedic work and one with a pedagogical intention. We explore the declarations in the prefaces and the encyclopaedic and linguistic content concentrating on the 1701 edition that is currently b...

European Journal of Social Theory, 1999

H. G. Wells's diverse works of literature and political theory make him a test case for lines of intersection between modernity and the Enlightenment, a period concerned with the relations between the two genres. Traditionally, studies of Wells go back only as far as Victorianism; conversely, literary studies rarely consider empiricist political theory in contexts later than Victorian realism. Wells's works challenge these conventions by reflecting on the writings of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wells questions the social contract hypothesis that individual interests contribute to society's well-being and demonstrates the centrality of empiricist political theory for the modernist novel. Through close readings of The Invisible Man and Love and Mr. Lewisham, and broader discussion of Wells's oeuvre, his engagement with empiricist values, conflicts, and literary forms emerges.

2013

This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and crosscultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The result is an invaluable reference for students, schol...

The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 260-262

Habermas’s critique of mass culture reflects the influence of Frankfurt School theorists Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Max Horkheimer, and, in particular, Theodor Adorno. In earlier work, his unsparing analysis incorporates their narrative of decline: the rapid descent from the heights of bourgeois art, which stimulated cultured audiences to critically entertain new forms of thought and social life, to the mass-produced commodities of popular culture that mitigate reflection and provide consumers with little more than immediate and distracting entertainment. Although Habermas does not completely give up this position in this later work, he will determine it to be “too simplistic.” His development of a model of intersubjectivist communicative reason will preclude him from viewing the ubiquity of mass culture as a justification for forsaking reason and thus altogether abandoning an enlightenment project that once animated Critical Theory.

Lexikos, 2011

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2004