Books Received

Books Received

Audi, Robert. Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision. New York: Routledge, 2006. xi, 249p., index. Moral principles of action, intention, and justification, plus consideration of weakness of will and self-deception.

Babich, Babette E. Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Albany: State U of New York P, 2006. xix, 394p., bibl., ill., index, $85. Readings of ancient myth and modern art through the lens of continental philosophy.

Bains, Paul. The Primacy of Semiotics: An Ontology of Relations. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. xi, 186p., bibl., index, $50. Signs as both real and ideal, embedded in both the interpreter and the signified.

Beauvoir, Simone de. Diary of a Philosophy Student: Vol. 1, 1926–27. Ed. Barbara Klaw, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006. xi, 374p., bibl., index, $40. The future feminist at age twenty.

Bell, T. E. Galdós and Darwin. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2006. viii, 189p., bibl., index, $80. Theories of social evolution in the Spanish novelist, including Haeckel and Spencer as well as Darwin.

Beneke, Chris. Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. ix, 305p., index. The proliferation of Protestant denominations in the eighteenth century and their institutionalization in law and a culture of acceptance.

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2006. 306p., index, $15.95. Everything Benjamin ever wrote about Baudelaire, whose genius was his inability to rise above his age.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 1938–1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2006. vi, 477p., index, $19.95. More Baudelaire, plus exchanges with Adorno, reviews, and essays on the arts.

Biow, Douglas. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. xxi, 244p., bibl., ill., index, $35. Sewage, laundry, soap, and latrines in humanist panegyrics, visual art, and popular songs.

Boureau, Alain. Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West. Tr. Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. xiii, 255p., bibl., index, $30. The formal study of evil, invented by St. Thomas, institutionalized by Pope John XXII, and practiced in law and philosophy.

Bradford, Roderick. D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker. Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus, 2006. 412p., bibl., ill., index, $32. Biography of a censored publisher in late-nineteenth-century America.

Bridgham, Fred, ed. The First World War as a Clash of Cultures. Rochester, N. Y.: Camden House, 2006. viii, 336p., bibl., index, $75. Ten essays on fears of invasion as expressed by British and German fiction writers, philosophers, and academics before 1914.

Cannell, Fenella, ed. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, N. C.: Duke UP, 2006. ix, 373p., bibl., index, $23.95. Sixteen studies by anthropologists highlighting the breadth of orthodoxy, ritual, and religious experience in particular localities in South Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific.

Cantor, Geoffrey and Marc Swetlitz, eds. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. xii, 260p., bibl., index, $24. Ten essays on Jewish fundamentalism and modernism, racial theory, and anti-Semitism.

Craig, David M. John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2006. x, 422p., bibl., index. Virtue, aesthetics, and economics, including contemporaries Mill and Marx.

Cromartie, Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642. Ideas in Context, vol. 75. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. x, 309p., bibl., index, $90. The rise of the unwritten Common Law, emphasizing the legal status of the church and the religious nature of the crown.

Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2003. xv, 623p., bibl., ill., index, $19.95. Tolerance and taboo from the ancient Mediterranean to the nineteenth century, including imperial China and pre-Meiji Japan.

Dahl, Robert A. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. xx, 176p., index, $15. Republication of 1956 critique of Madisonian...