One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”
But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.
So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.
In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.
A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”
More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)
Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.
Rule one: know thyself
This maxim, carved into the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, serves as a reminder that demeanor is important. As Plato learned, speakers who talk down to their listeners are likely to be dismissed as holier-than-thou prigs. So, it’s more effective to offer one’s advice, like Abraham, with a dose of modesty.
Rule two: know thy audience
Better even then know thyself is know thy audience. If a given leader has a history of saber-rattling and plans to start a new arms race, this is probably not the best time to propose a National Endowment for the Arts.
In a democracy, We the People are the ultimate court of public opinion, and in this instance, emotion is often more effective than reason. Greed was all it took to get the ancient Athenians to launch their disastrous expedition against Syracuse, while Mark Antony, in his Funeral Oration for Julius Caesar, used anger to “let slip the dogs of war.” Fear works, too. Just ask the hordes of murderers, rapists, and pedophiles waiting to unleash Armageddon on our borders. Catchy, imperative phrases can be highly effective if they encapsulate a strong emotion. “Build the wall!” and “drain the swamp!” are good examples. “Build Back Better,” not so much.
Rule three: make it win-win
Terrible things happened to David after he was rebuked by Nathan, but in a strictly political sense his willingness to accept the charge (rather than, say, putting Nathan on an enemies list) established David as a legitimate ruler, and not a tyrant. Similarly, that saber-rattling ruler who would never hear of an endowment for the arts might actually listen to someone who pointed out that the pen can be mightier than the sword.
Rule four: flattery is good, finesse is better
In the fourth century, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, author of an influential life of Constantine the Great, was present when a speaker dubbed the first Christian emperor a saint and told him he would surely continue to rule in the afterlife. Constantine, who cultivated a public image of prayer and humility, exploded, and that speaker was never heard from again. A speech of Eusebius’s own survives, and a modern reader might be forgiven for thinking the bishop was being just as flattering, but in fact he chose his words much more carefully. Taking note of Constantine’s well-known penchant for public applause, for instance, Eusebius claims, “The cheers of the crowds and the voices of flatterers he holds more a nuisance than a pleasure, because of his stern character and the upright rearing of his soul.”
Eusebius shows he had mastered the trick that the conspirator Decius centuries later would explain in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” as the ability to deliver such praise while seeming not to: “But when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being most flatterèd.”
Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.
Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ byRaffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thinker statues form a fascinating, but little explored cultural theme. While we may be most familiar with Rodin’s thinker, thinker statues, both male and female, appear in many very diverse cultures. They include appearances in Roman art, the pensive bodhisattvas of Korea and China, the pensive Christ statues of Eastern Europe and Italy, the thinker statues of Kazakhstan and Africa, as well as the female thinkers of the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture.
Korean bodhisattva. Used with permission from the National Museum of Korea.
What is common among all the thinker statues despite their different cultural and religious background is that they incorporate a mental attitude, thinking. At the same time the thinker statues are themselves objects. Now these two notions, attitudes and objects, of course, compose the title of my book (which also includes the Korean bodhisattva on its cover). This title targets the two facets of the topic of the book, which addresses what sorts of objects are involved in the various mental attitudes—thinking, doubting, imagining, inferring, questioning, hypothesizing—as well as their manifestations in speech, asserting, suggesting, asking, answering, and demanding.
The objects involved crucially play the role of content bearers (representing situations) or as things that can be satisfied or violated (a command can be satisfied or violated, a question can be satisfied by an answer). The standard philosophical view about mental attitudes and their linguistic manifestations (speech acts) is that they are all relations to the same sort of object, a proposition. A proposition is just the sort of thing that is taken to make up the content of a that-clause, with which verbs describing mental attitudes or speech acts generally go along: The thinker thought that life is a mystery; the speaker said that life is a mystery.
Kazakhstan thinker. Author’s personal photo.
Philosophers, starting with Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century, took the syntactic form of attitude reports and speech act reports to wear their logical form on their sleeves: attitude verbs like “think” and speech verbs like “say” take two arguments: an agent, and the thing that makes up the content of a that-clause, a proposition. Propositions, the putative objects of attitudes and contents of attitudes and speech acts, thus are considered the content bearers involved in attitudes and speech acts. However, as objects, propositions need to be abstract and mind-independent since they are meanings of sentences and can be shared by different agents, and that raises lots of problems—how can an abstract object be grasped by the mind and why should an abstract object be able to be true or false or represent anything in the first place? Moreover, mental attitudes and speech acts just do not seem to be relations to mere content objects: we do not think or say propositions or any objects whatsoever.
This book takes a different approach. The objects involved in mental attitudes like thinking, imagining, and questioning are the things we refer to as thoughts, imaginations, and questions. Thinking thus means “engaging in a thought,” imagining means “engaging in an imagination,” etc. Since we make explicit reference to such attitudinal objects in natural language, we can let ourselves be guided by our linguistically manifest intuitions about such objects. All those objects have truth or satisfaction conditions: a belief can be true, a hypothesis correct, a command can be complied with or violated.
A female thinker statue from the Tumaco-La Tolita culture. Luz Miriam Toro Collection. Used with permission.
Different attitudinal objects, as one can quickly see, go along with different predicates of satisfaction and these can tell us a lot about what truth and representation consist in. For example, the selection of particular predicates of satisfaction indicates that truth is a norm some attitudinal objects come with (beliefs, assertions, hypotheses) and that actions are the sorts of things that other attitudinal objects may require for their satisfaction and may even qualify as “correct” (commands, suggestions). Lots of philosophically exciting views and options can be read off the linguistic manifestation of the ontology of attitudinal objects, as well as their more abstract kin, modal objects of the sort of obligations, permissions, needs, and options.
The thinker statue is an object and her thinking is an attitude that in turn involves an object, the bearer of truth. On the view developed in this book, that object is a thought, an object extremely well-reflected in natural language.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the lives and legacies of inspiring women that played path-breaking roles in shaping philosophy and literature. This reading list features five books that amplify the achievements of these women who were either overshadowed by men, or subject to hierarchical thinking. As we work to accelerate action for gender equality these five biographies show a defiance against systemic barriers and biases faced by women, both in personal and professional spheres. From the engrossing biographies of famous literary authors, to the eye-opening accounts of female thinkers who were silenced by the social norms of the times, these books are sure to inspire action, equality, and inclusion.
1. The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman by Andrew Janiak
Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. However due to the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon (primarily Voltaire and Kant) eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories – her ideas were suppressed, or attributed to the men around her, and for generations afterwards, she was forgotten.
Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism—a submerged counternarrative—that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction by E.J. Clery
Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reaches far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself. This Very Short Introduction examines the conditions for Wollstonecraft’s emergence as a feminist, but also her status as an educator, a political thinker, and a romantic.
4. Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse by Chi-ming Yang
The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler’s development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another, her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.
The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner’s life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention and how the interplay of past and present selves, allows us to find new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.
Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.
The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.
Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.
Our challenge, the romantics argued, is not to liberate humanity from myths but to create new myths—new symbols and stories—that serve to awaken the human mind to its hidden potential. We are all mythmakers. We all use our powers of imagination to sustain the worldview we inhabit. Our task is to become aware of those powers, and with that awareness rewrite the narratives that have kept us trapped in feelings of separation from ourselves and the world at large.
The modern experience is one of alienation, incompleteness, and aloneness. We’ve fallen prey to the illusion that everything is divided. The new mythologies that the romantics set out to create turn on symbols and stories of a greater unity that connects all things. The romantics held that our path to wholeness lies in reawakening the imagination and experiencing the world poetically. They believed that myths can allow us to see ourselves as members of a larger family—a “world family”—that includes all living beings on Earth.
But how, you might ask, is this even possible? How can mythology serve a liberating function? Are myths not false and deceptive? And shouldn’t we try to escape myths entirely?
All good questions, and ones the romantics heard loudly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:
1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.
Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.
2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.
Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.
3. Reflexivity. When we become aware of our mythmaking powers, we can fashion symbols and stories that position ourselves as the authors or artists of our lives.
In Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Hardenberg (known by his pen name Novalis), the protagonist discovers a book that reflects images from his own life. He has the uncanny realization that the book he is reading is a kind of mirror into his soul. The novel thereby displays a process of acquiring self-understanding through symbols, stories, images, and allegories—in short, through all the elements of mythology.
4. Participation. Because the romantics wanted to make us aware of our creative powers, the stories and symbols they fashion serve to invite us into the very process of mythmaking.
Schlegel’s novel Lucinde is a story about a young man who discovers his artistic potential by falling in love. The novel is itself an invitation for readers to turn inward and discover their own ability to make their lives into a work of art. The novel is meant to be a stimulus for self-inquiry for the reader, who is called upon to see herself through the lens of mythology.
What then makes any given mythology “new” is that it isn’t trying to mask its origin in the human imagination. All the mythologies of romanticism share this feature in common. They are ongoing works in progress, as alive today as they were over two centuries ago. The mythologies of romanticism are like paintings left deliberately unfinished by a painter, with the hope that we will feel inspired to pick up the brush and contribute our own complex patterns of color.
Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.
Oxford editors from across our press submit books for catalog consideration; our sales team evaluates forecasts and sales patterns to determine the market for each title; and the trade marketing and publicity teams coordinate, plan, and pitch to get these titles in front of readers. Each year, when December rolls around, we excitedly wait to see which titles will be featured in the year end “Best Books” lists put out by the major media outlets including The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Economist, The New Yorker, TLS, and more. Inclusion on these lists serves as yet another seal of approval, highlighting the quality of the content, wide appeal, accessibility, and novelty of the books we publish. Being featured in such reputable lists and selected by the top critics and thinkers reinforces the press’s reputation for publishing high-quality, impactful work.
As the world’s oldest and largest university press, OUP holds an important place in the publishing landscape. The press’s mission is an extension of the university’s—we strive for excellence in research, scholarship, and education through our global publishing program. A crucial aspect of the trade team’s role is making sure that the work of Oxford’s academics and scholars isn’t kept solely within the confines of academia, but instead is shared with the wider population. Through the use of accessible and engaging writing, OUP’s trade books share the expertise of highly qualified researchers with the general public, allowing new ideas to spread and reshape our knowledge of the world.
The ‘Best Books’ lists which numerous major media outlets share annually represent the capstone of yearly book coverage. All year, publicists submit books to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and other outlets for review, excerpt, author interviews and news coverage. In the last 12 months, the New York Times (with its 153 million reported unique visitors per month) covered 18 of OUP’s titles—including a review ofMaking the Presidencywhich drew comparisons between John Adams and Kamala Harris’s legacy, and an Op-Ed by the authors of Wreckonomicswhich asked when liberals became so comfortable with war.
Beyond the Times, in the last year 11 books were featured or reviewed on the BBC, 19 in the Wall Street Journal, 15 in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 in the Financial Times, 8 in the London Review of Books, another 11 in Time Magazine, and to the delight of the author, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Orderwas recommended on Oprah Daily. These reviews are truly just the tip of the iceberg in publicity campaigns that also include hundreds of podcasts, local media coverage, and events that bring authors directly into communities. The additional visibility a book receives when it is reviewed in major outlets often translates to significant boosts in sales and allows authors to extend the size of their audience and the reach of their message. This visibility is also many authors’ first exposure to OUP’s range of publishing and can be instrumental in attracting future authors that help the program grow and diversify.
Each year’s list of best book serves as a distillation of our collective questions and priorities as a society. Trade publishing must be more agile than traditional academic publishing because every title has to tap in to at least a certain portion of the zeitgeist. As a reflection of preoccupying questions, last year’s list was topped by Kirkus’s selection of Trans Children in Today’s Schools, as well as both Defectors and The Rublefrom our Russian and Soviet history lists. This year, different trends have clearly risen to the top of readers’ consciousness. The New Statesman (in their seasonal lists released throughout the year) have selected not one but two Oxford books on AI. The AI Mirrorby Shannon Vallor—a former AI ethicist at Google—offers advice on reclaiming our humanity in the approaching age of machine thinking. AI Morality edited by David Edmonds is a collection of essays from leading philosophers exploring some of the nearly endless questions about our changing relationship with AI.
Similarly, this year’s list includes two titles about China. The former prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd’s book On Xi Jinping and Oriana Sklyar Mastro’s Upstartboth provide informed perspectives on China’s role in the global world. When asked why she chose to write her second book for a general audience, Dr. Mastro points out that China’s power has impact far outside of academia and she wanted to make sure her work could reach readers in all walks of life.
The support that the trade marketing and publicity teams provides authors is crucial to strengthening their careers. Debut authors utilize our platform to both benefit their scholarly careers through the academic prestige the Oxford brand provides while simultaneously developing their presence as a noted subject matter expert in the media. This recognition grows in tandem with the author’s career, allowing the Oxford trade program to retain successful authors as well as attract well-established authors who haven’t previously published with us.
This year, COMBEE by Edda L. Fields-Black was selected as one of The New Yorker’s recommended titles and among The Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. Dr. Fields-Black is a direct descendent of one of the hundreds of formerly enslaved men who liberated themselves after the Battle of Port Royal and joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers to fight in the Combahee River Raid along with Harriet Tubman. Only her second book, and her first written for a wide audience, it was essential to Dr. Fields-Black that she had an opportunity to share both her research and also her family’s story.
On the other end of the spectrum, the trade team works with many authors and scholars who are well-established in their careers and come to OUP with ample experience and high expectations of the publishing process. Our team was honored to have the opportunity to work with Noel Malcolm on his 12th book Forbidden Desire which was named by both The Times Literary Supplement and History Today as one of the best books of 2024. Malcolm has published across academic and trade publishing houses during his long career, and it was important that we be able to provide him with the highest level of marketing and publicity possible.
All of the books published by Oxford are the culmination of years of work on the part of the authors, research assistants, editors, designers, marketers, and publicists. Each one is an accomplishment that has the potential to move knowledge forward. The books in our trade program—with their potential to speak to all readers—represent a unique opportunity to inform, illuminate, and entertain. Join us in celebrating the best books of 2024.
