The Explanatory Gap: The Responses of Horgan and Papineau Essay

The Explanatory Gap: The Responses of Horgan and Papineau The what it is like to undergo an experience is essential to understanding that experience. Known by philosophers as subjective qualia, these characteristics are part of what makes a felt experience exactly that experience. If we introspect our own mental states, this seems apparent and incontrovertible. Most philosophers are unwilling to grant that subjective qualia are non-physical states, and attempts to face this problem and maintain physicalism must address arguments from qualia. While differing physical explanations for these subjective qualia exist, I will only briefly refer to them here as qualia will serve only as a means of leading the reader to the Explanatory Gap(1). The Explanatory Gap is a uniquely puzzling problem for physicalist philosophies of mind. The felt qualities of any experience, in addition to being essential to and inseparable from that very experience, are also perspectivally subjective. This means that the experiencer must be experiencing those felt qualities now or have felt them at some previous time and be recalling them to have a full concept of the phenomena. Perhaps this philosophical language will be more understandable with examples of what is really another readily apparent notion- Could a person know the awfulness of pain if she was born without the capacity to feel any pains? Could a person experience the specific joy of strawberries and Champagne without ever having had this exact experience? It would be difficult to deny that subjective qualia are perspectivally unique. One would face seemingly absurd possibilities such as feeling someone else's pains, and not having any subjective character to your own phenomenal experienc... ... from Kripke by Joseph Levine, "Materialism And Qualia: The Explanatory Gap," Pacific Philosophic Quarterly, Vol. 64, eds. Hartry Field, Barbara Herman, Brian Loar, Miles Morgan, 1983; p.359. 8 This paragraph and the next are a paraphrase of Terence Horgan, "Jackson On Physical Information And Qualia" Philosophical Quarterly, 34: (1984) 147-52. 9 David Papineau's position is taken from chapter 4 of his book Philosophical Naturalism, entitled "Consciousness and the Antipathetic Fallacy." I acquired this from the world wide web @ http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/philosophy/ch4.html, but it was published in print in 1993. 10 Ibid., this connection is made in a footnote by Papineau to Horgan on the eighth page of chapter 4 (I am afraid I don't know the printed version's page number). 11 Ibid., page 11 of chapter 4. 12 Ibid., page 18 of chapter 4.

Diet and Exercise Analysis Essay

Yes, my eating habits has changed between week 2 and week 4. However, I have done a little cheating. I have eaten a few foods that I was staying away from. Foods like hot dogs, french fries and pizza among other foods I did not need. These are foods that I have been staying away from for a few months now. I can honestly say, since I have been staying away from the fatty foods, I was feeling difference. Now, this pass week, I have been eating junk foods, and I can really feel the difference. I have less energy, and my body feels way it used to feel when I was always eating junk foods and fast foods. Yes†¦ good glad you noted this. It is amazing when we clean it up†¦how much better we feel and how bad we feel when we eat crappy! My phsyical physical activities has changed a little in the pass two weeks. I have been doing a little walking, I have also been getting out and getting into more activities than usual. Next week after mother’s day, my sisters and myself are planning on doing some more walking and a lttle more exercise. We are planning on doing it together. Maybe we can make it a little more fun and a little bit more exciting. This is something I am really looking forward to. The similarities and differences of my current diet to the recommendations. I do not think that there is too much of a difference. B because my diet and exercise have not been too good this pass past week. Bbecause the last two weeks have been busy and stressful. However, I can still honestly say, that my eating habits and exercise habits has changed over time. Which I do plan on starting it up again. I do plan on getting back on track wth my diet and exercise. Content and Development (6 points) Points Earned: 6/ 6 Length: 150 to 300 words Additional Comments: All key elements of the assignment are covered in a substantive way. Includes a screenshot of tracking results Describes student’s current eating habits briefly describes any changes compared to Weeks 2 and 4 Compares the similarities and differences of student’s current diet to the recommendations Briefly explains any change to student’s physical activity regimen from Week 4 Content is comprehensive, accurate, and persuasive. The summary develops a central theme or idea directed toward the appropriate audience. The summary links theory to relevant examples and uses the vocabulary of the theory correctly. Major points are stated clearly, organized logically, and supported by specific details, examples, or analysis. Introduction provides sufficient background on the topic and previews major points. Conclusion is logical, flows from the body of the summary, and reviews the major points. Readability and Style (2 points) Points Earned: 2/ 2 Paragraph transitions are present, logical, and maintain the flow throughout the paper. Additional Comments: The tone is appropriate to the content and assignment. Sentences are complete, clear, and concise. Sentences are well constructed, strong, and varied. Sentence transitions are present and maintain the flow of thought. Mechanics (2 points) Points Earned:0 / 2 Formatting is consistent with APA guidelines (including headings, title page, and reference page) and meets course-level requirements (outlined at the Center for Writing Excellence). Additional Comments: Intellectual property is recognized with in-text citations and a reference page. Rules of grammar, usage, and punctuation are followed. Spelling is correct. Total (10 points) Points Earned: 8/ 10 Mekie, I took two points for the errors you have in the paper – grammatical and APA. You are single spacing and adding a space which makes terms capitalize by themselves and is really incorrect in that you cannot do this. You had a few wrong terms in the writing which you didn’t see when you proofread the work; however, your evaluation/examination of your journey is good in terms of what you are explaining you have learned. Good work! There is a Chinese proverb I like to use when discussing diets and that is â€Å"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step!† It seems appropriate to the process of modifying our diets for the better. This process takes time†¦but just keep going in the right direction.

Tragedy in Waco Texas

Many people in this world tend to belong to a religious group. People feel that religion is a way to fill an emptiness they may be feeling inside. It is a way to comfort those who may have lost loved ones knowing that they are now in a â€Å"better place† and we too will join them there once it is our time. However, some people belong to either a religious sect or cult. These groups are not considered meet the standards of what it means to be a religion or they simply do not have enough people following them. In the early 90s, many people had a narrow-minded vision of what exactly the Branch Davidians were in Waco Texas.Stuart A. Wright presented an unbiased opinion in his book Armageddon in Waco so everyone could question what really happened and whether or not the government was justified in their actions. There are several differences between a religion, a sect, and a cult. According to our notes worldly religions meet a certain criteria to be known mainstream. Each religio n has a long history of existence and ancient texts. The religion has many people who follow it and elites that adhere and accept it (i. e. Emperor Constantine).The religion is normalized an influential; no one questions the faith. Finally, there is a cultural/social integration of the religion; for example, when someone new is being initiated into the presidency they must swear on the Bible. Some major religions are Christianity containing 2. 1 billion followers, Islam containing 1. 5 billion followers, and Judaism containing 14 million followers (class slide show dated 11/18). A religious sect has similar qualities of a religion, but they feel they have made improvements to older established religious.According to our notes, sects are a branch of previously existing religions; the group uses old ancient texts (like the Bible or the Qur’an) and mix new interpretations of that text. An example of this would be the book of Mormon. These sects are not fully accepted in mainstre am society and are considered to be â€Å"weird† by major religions. The sect usually contained a small number of followers who have a disdain for mainstream religions. Elites are not usually members of religious sects, but rather choose to attack them claiming they are blasphemers. Finally, many sects started to reform a much larger church.Some examples of religious sects would be the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Scientologists (class slide show dated 11/18). Although, I would argue that Scientology has more cult like qualities than sect like qualities; it is only labeled a sect because its members are people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta. A group that is considered a cult usually does not have many members all of which are not dependent on orthodox religious beliefs. According to our notes, cults usually have many different ideas, a lot of which are about the end of the world.These groups are often hostile, but at the same time provide members with everythin g the group needs. Outsiders often view these groups as threats; this is why they are labeled a cult. Cults have deviant beliefs about sex, drug use, and other acceptable behavior (class slide show dated 11/18). Myths are also associated with cults and the media plays on these myths to present these cults as a threat to society. According to our notes from the slideshow, some cult myths are that members are brainwashed, they are sexual deviants, there is abuse among members, and there are strange acts like sacrificing animals etc.An example of a cult would be Jim Jones and the People’s Temple mass suicide. Jim Jones managed to create one of the largest mass suicides in history convincing 900 people to kill themselves by drinking poisonous Kool-Aid. In my opinion, the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas could be classified as a sect with cult-like characteristics. According to the documentary, â€Å"The Final Report: Waco Tragedy,† the Branch Davidian group is a branch of th e Seven Day Adventist Church. Their leader, David Koresh, taught his follows of many end time prophecies.Koresh was following the teachings of the founding Davidian named Victor Tasho Houteff. According to Stuart A. Wright, who edited the book Armageddon in Waco, â€Å"Houteff interpreted the Bible in terms of prophecy fulfillment†¦he reconstructed a history on the basis of mysterious and arcane passages recorded in Daniel, and interpreted signs in current events which suggested fulfillment of end times† (pg. 23). Many myths circling cults are about end times and the end of the world itself. Since that is the basis of the Branch Davidian group it is obvious why they were view as â€Å"different† or â€Å"crazy† when thinking the world will end.During the early 1990’s, the Davidians were a very closed off group living in their compound called Mt. Carmel; this played right into cult like myths presented by the media. It brought about questions like â⠂¬Å"What are they doing it there? † or â€Å"Why is everything secretive? It must be illegal. † It didn’t help that the Davidians had their own money system and educational system in order to design the culture for future generations (Wright pg. 27). According to the documentary â€Å"Waco: Rules of Engagement,† David Koresh had several children with various different â€Å"wives. All of said â€Å"wives† were in actuality the legal wives of his followers. This played right into another cult myth; the myth that the Branch Davidians had deviant beliefs toward sex. Although the Davidians have many cult-like myths circling them, the fact remains they are just myths not proof. The group did not meet any other of the criteria for being considered a cult. It was obvious that the government wanted to pose this little branch of the Seven Day Adventist Church as a threat because they did not meet social norms.Cults are said to be their own group entirely wi th new thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. The Branch Davidians share the beliefs of the Seven Day Adventists since that is the religion they stem from. This makes the groups more of a sect with some cult-like characteristics. David Koresh was also look upon as a threat because he was housing illegal firearms. According to the documentary â€Å"Waco: The Rules of Engagement,† Koresh was presented to the people as an insane cult leader who was in possession of illegal weapons.The media, BTAF, and FBI construed people into believing Koresh would use these weapons on people thus making Koresh a threat to the public. The ATF warrants against Koresh accused him of holding these illegal weapons as well as sexually abusing children (which still cannot be proven). To make the Waco group more of a threat to the public the media, former Davidians, and the government all make certain claims about the group and play into people’s fears. â€Å"Claims-making is more effective if the part icular issues target problems that reflect pre-existing or widespread social fears and apprehensions† (Wright 79).Claims making allows a small window for what they consider to be outside of the social norm; in other words you can be â€Å"weird,† but not â€Å"too weird. † The media presented David Koresh with the nickname â€Å"The Sinful Messiah. † The name itself sends out an alert in people’s minds; anyone who hears this derogatory name is now well aware this man must be a â€Å"weirdo. † On March 3, 1993, Mark England and Darlene McCormick released an article in the Waco Tribune-Herald Series called â€Å"The Sinful Messiah,† calling David Koresh by his birth name (Vernon Howell) and spreading rumors about various things he was accused of in the Mt.Carmel compound. England and McCormick claim they have interviewed several former Davidian members who said Koresh was guilty of abusing children physically and psychologically, having sex with underage girls, and had at least 15 â€Å"wives. † England and McCormick also make claims that Koresh (or Howell as they refer to him) fathered many children from his various â€Å"wives† while living in the compound. It says in the article, â€Å"County records show no birth certificates for many children whom former cult members said have been born to Branch Davidian women since the late 1980's.A former cult member once registered as a midwife in McLennan County said she delivered twin girls in 1991 to a young Branch Davidian woman living at Mount Carmel. The midwife said Howell ordered her not to register the babies with local officials, a violation of state law. † The problem with these accusations however, is that they are all from â€Å"anonymous† sources. It is almost like reading a tabloid magazine. If a tabloid is trying to make it seem like two people in Hollywood are dating they will write in the article quotes from these â€Å"anonym ous† sources that are proven false majority of the time.When I read this article I had the same feeling as if I were reading a bogus article in Star Magazine. I also feel the way England and McCormick refused to call him David Koresh seemed derogatory. The fact that the writers purposely called him Vernon Howell gave the article an air of sarcasm. It was as if they were saying, â€Å"Look at this crazy guy who thinks he’s the messiah; his name is Vernon Howell. † However, the article fails to mention Vernon Howell did in fact change his name legally to David Koresh. I do not think by any means that David Koresh was the messiah, but I think it was wrong to mock the fact that he changed his name.The media wanted to present him as some crazy man from Texas; the writers were clearly mocking him and wanted to let the public know it was allowed and encouraged to look at David Koresh as if he were insane. The only real source in the article seemed to be from a girl by t he name of Kiri Jewell. Kiri’s father and mother were divorced and had joint custody of her. However, her father rarely saw her when Kiri and her mother went to live in the compound. However, the child abuse thing was blown completely out of proportion.After the massacre occurred and the hearings were going on in congress in 1995, Kiri Jewell testified against David Koresh claiming he sexually abused her. According to footage shown in the documentary â€Å"Waco: Rules of Engagement,† Kiri went on record saying that when she was just 10 years old she was sexually assaulted by Koresh. However, Kiri Jewell is not a reliable source as well. In the documentary, after Kiri makes her statement, the Davidians defense attorneys show that Jewell has made several contradictory statements in the past. The documentary then flashes to an interview with the Sherriff of Waco.He explains that they are yet to charge Koresh of any form of abuse, but if there was anything like that going on with girls that were at least fourteen and had parental consent then it is not illegal. It may be morally wrong to outsiders looking in, but to them it was perfectly natural and acceptable (not saying I agree with that, but I’m not a Branch Davidian). However, I do think the media took one girl’s accusations and made a mountain out of a molehill. They knew people would respond poorly after hearing any form of abuse toward children, thus justifying the military actions towards the Waco group.In class we watched two documentaries; one was titled â€Å"The Final Report: Tragedy at Waco† the other titled â€Å"Waco: Rules of Engagement. † Both documentaries gave viewers extremely different feelings toward them same event in Waco, Texas. When watching â€Å"The Final Report: Tragedy at Waco,† the producers of the documentary purposely make the Branch Davidian group seem alien and obviously cannot be trusted since they were so closed off from everyone else. The documentary starts off by asking a series of questions like â€Å"Who are the Branch Davidians? and â€Å"Who is David Koresh? † There is music playing in the background almost comparable to that someone would hear in a horror movie. It is clear from the start the purpose of this documentary is to make the Branch Davidians seem like a menacing crazy cult from the Boondocks of Texas. This documentary also only seemed to present one side of the story. The made it seem like it was the most obvious thing in the world that the Davidians wanted to kill themselves in a mass suicide and therefore, when under attack by the FBI, started a fire.This documentary was shorter and did not present a fair amount of details from both sides of the story. This documentary even has the world â€Å"tragedy† in the title; right away people will play into the idea that the fire was just another mass suicide by some insane religious â€Å"cult† in the middle of no where Texa s. It played right into what the media stereotyped the group to look like. The second documentary we watched was titled â€Å"Waco: Rules of Engagement. † In my opinion this documentary was much more fair and presented both sides as best as it could.This documentary was done with a more unbiased eye, unlike the first one. However, this documentary did do a successful job of making the FBI look like screw-ups and this whole thing was just a big government cover-up. Maybe it just showed the incident at Mount Carmel for exactly what it was. Technically in the documentary the FBI did a good job of making themselves look like screw-ups because the documentary simply showed footage of thing various agents said. On some level this documentary did manipulate viewers; for example when they showed the dead bodies that were burned it gave the Davidians a sympathy vote.However, this documentary did not alter anything, but rather presented it as it was. I felt it allowed the people to get a clearer look at what happen and maybe see the media altered people’s perception of what really happened. It is difficult to say who started the fire. In my opinion this whole raid was a complete screw up. In the book Armageddon in Waco it says, â€Å"The BATF raid was a monumental failure. Subsequently, the April 19, 1993, FBI CS gas assault on the compound and the ensuing fire (whatever its cause) fulfilled only one stated objective—that of suppressing an armed group.The children who were to be saved from abuse died instead† (Wright pg. 229). There is no accurate cause of what started the fire. However, according to the documentary â€Å"Waco: Rules of Engagement† I have reason to believe it was started by accident from the FBI tanks. After the FBI released the gas that was supposed to be harmless and â€Å"nonflammable† into the compound it was shown by the person who invented infrared cameras and readings that several shots were fired from FB I tanks even though they went on record saying no shots were fired that day.During the trials they tried to present it like those flashes were light being reflected, however, these cameras only pick up heat so it would be virtually impossible to pick up a reflection; needless to say Congress and everyone in the courtroom were obviously stunned. In my own personal opinion I feel the shots from the FBI tanks mixed with the gas released into the compound were the cause of the fire. After seeing interviews with various Branch Davidian members who died on that day it was obvious they had no intention of this mass suicide.It doesn’t even coincide with their beliefs; they believed that there would be a final battle, which they would come out victorious. Although on some levels this was a battle I do not believe they would have given up and killed themselves. If there who belief system was based on this battle wouldn’t they fight back? When the fire started it looked like seve ral explosions were going off. That could only have occurred when the shots mixed with the gas that was spread throughout the building. The FBI did not want to admit they messed up big time so they formed an alliance with the media presenting a completely different story.If someone were to see a headline about the Branch Davidians they would see words like â€Å"cult† and â€Å"mass suicide. † The media presented the story as if the group started the fire themselves. Media groups claimed to have phone conversations indicating they had planned these actions; however, the phone conversations so no indication that the Branch Davidians had any intention of starting a fire to kill all its members. Most people even tried to escape the compound when it was in flames. If a mass suicide were really the planned course of action why would people be trying to escape?Although the media presents that the fire was entirely the Branch Davidians’ fault, other evidence can prove otherwise. We discussed in class that this incident at Waco was indirectly to the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh felt it would send a clear message to attack the groups involved in the trials of the Branch Davidians because of their greatest mistake and cover-up. McVeigh was so angered by this government cover up that he felt he should bomb the federal buildings where people like FBI and ATF agents worked.He realized after it was wrong to kill innocent people and said he should have only gone after those involved in the incident at Waco. Although very different, religions, sects, cults have lots in common. They each have a group of lost souls who are looking beyond this life in hopes of a better afterlife. The Davidian’s beliefs may have been questionable, but it is what they believed. This is America where in our first amendment we have freedom of religion. The Davidians were nice people and did not deserve they fate they were delt.

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth’s romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, â€Å"The Prelude† (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keats’s great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and women’s, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary  criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. ————————————————- Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics. The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, â€Å"Romantic† is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled â€Å"Romantic movement† at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the  Ã¢â‚¬Å"organic,† â€Å"plastic† qualities of Romantic art and the â€Å"mechanical† character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that â€Å"a new heaven is begun† was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s â€Å"The world’s great age begins anew.† â€Å"These, these will give the world another heart, / A nd other pulses,† wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of â€Å"truth,† the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: â€Å"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.† The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier â€Å"cult of sensibility†; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,† and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as â€Å"feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.† It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw  the imagination as the supre me poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as â€Å"invention, imagination and judgement,† but Blake wrote: â€Å"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.† The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized â€Å"reason.† Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the â€Å"noble savage† was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the â€Å"poor Indian† of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to th e dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, â€Å"You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.† This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of â€Å"genres,† each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or â€Å"gaudy and inane,† and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language. Poetry BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express  their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Expe rience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implication s of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems â€Å"The Ruined Cottage† and â€Å"The Pedlar† (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west  of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,† continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative â€Å"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child â€Å"fostered alike by beauty and by fear† by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the â€Å"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.† In poems such as â€Å"Michael† and â€Å"The Brothers,† by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in â€Å"The Eolian Harp† (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as â€Å"Religious Musings† and â€Å"The Destiny of Nations.† Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relatio nship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as â€Å"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Frost at Midnight† (now sometimes called the â€Å"conversation poems† but collected by Coleridge himself as â€Å"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse†) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. â€Å"Kubla Khan† (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in â€Å"a kind of Reverie,† represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of â€Å"The Ancient Mariner† and the unfinished  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Christabel.† After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† (1802), another meditat ive poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his â€Å"shaping spirit of Imagination.† The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal†¦as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, â€Å"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.† The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as â€Å"the most impressive talker of his age† (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. â€Å"Melancholy† was quite the buzzword for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance one’s creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a reaction against the Enlightenment mode of thinking. Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. Thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The response of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connection with medievalism and mythology. The tales of King Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formal  level, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the structure and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to blank verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. Some criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation. He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something entirely original and completely misunderstood by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections. Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, few of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely successful  work, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifically the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworth’s poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects. There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New England Transcendental Movement. The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an optimistic brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect earned the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists working during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were crafting dens ely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism. However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his own  brilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their reappraisal of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melville’s literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that required close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melville’s writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns more than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficia lly, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and above the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human. Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the mania of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitman’s voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitman’s brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style t o verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century. Walt Whitman got his start as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitman’s democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of â€Å"strange† beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings earned him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of the  original masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poe’s theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American litera ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of suggestion and imagination. The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthorne’s deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even the grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hester’s daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthorne’s particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism. His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the conviction that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of reality was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a person’s consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† neither the reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never completely disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface. Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems of  life in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more earthy kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.

Performance Incentive Programs in Healthcare Research Paper

Performance Incentive Programs in Healthcare - Research Paper Example In the second report of the Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, the â€Å"quality gap† of the healthcare practice in America was revealed with over 70 studies documenting quality shortcomings.   The quality gap was more prominent in the care that people should receive and the care that they do not receive.   In the second report of the Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, the â€Å"quality gap† of the healthcare practice in America was revealed with over 70 studies documenting quality shortcomings.   The quality gap was more prominent in the care that people should receive and the care that they do not receive.    B. Flaws in the structure of the current health care payment system- fee for service part of the structural flaw that led to quality gaps and the deteriorated state of US healthcare system was partly attributed to the systems of payment to medical providers that do not encourage quality but rather volume.1. Fee for service does not consider quality, efficiency, and cost management quality gaps and deteriorated state of health care that is susceptible to error that accounted for 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year in the US could have been attributed to the fee for service payment system that does not consider quality, efficiency and cost management (IOM, 2001).   The fee for service payment systems stresses more on quantity and volume rather than the quality of care that a medical provider gives to a patient. 2. Managed Care Organizations differHMOs, PPOs are third-party managed care organizations that also differ in payment to medical providers.   This payment system is not driven to provide quality care but to reduce its cost which could be inimical to the quality of care rendered since the fees are already predetermined.

Job analysis Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Job analysis - Assignment Example hen a certain task is given to a custom agent, it is upon him to see that the task is accomplished precisely, rather than assuming that some other sailor will do it. In addition, a custom employee should not drift through his time while in the job. Each one of them must pay attention to all details no matter how small the matter may be. According to their guiding principles, attention to any detail may signify the difference between failure or success of a given task, and between life and death (Young 15). A custom employee is not expected to play favorites or put into effect the rules without considering honesty and neutrality. Permitting some custom officers to ignore other rules will bring challenges in the field. Integrity at the border and port also requires that a custom worker hold on to his or her responsibility no matter what comes on his or her way. This is the reason why their regulations provide that no custom officer should quit in simple tasks. With this in mind, a custom officer can never give up, even when he sees a likelihood of death, while carrying on his duties. A good custom officer is ethically responsible. He knows what is wrong and what is not, so he tries to do only what is acceptable. He performs all duties in a timely and correct human way possible without any worries of the inconveniences or personal gain. A custom officer does not entertain immature self-seekers who prioritize his or her best efforts solely when there is a personal reward. A custom officer should not be stubborn, resentful, self-important individual who turns down orders. The laid down rules and regulations guide the daily operation of the customs department, and if followed by all custom employees, life in the field can be so easy and enjoyable for everyone (Young 23). In the customs department, a team is much greater than an individual is. Given that, every team has leaders and simple members, every custom employee is part of a team, and he should respect and work

Leadership Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 18

Leadership - Essay Example These will act as a guide or baseline of the alignment. The other way leaders use to align the organization is by identifying all the stakeholders in the organization because they are the key to the sustainability of the new alignment and hence have to be involved. Due to the risks an organization is likely to go through, the stakeholders should be informed of every decision so that they can stand by the organization in case of any ambiguity in future. Leaders also integrate and assimilate information which they have first analyzed from all perspectives. This information may be concerning the political environment, relationships, competitors among others and which are crucial for the alignment and running of the organization. The information is integrated after ensuring that it will not sink the organization (Rampersad 2003). Positive change involves transformation of the organization in terms of the attitudes and motivation of the employees by the leader. This transformation requires the leader to engage several actions which are discussed below (Teerlink and Ozley 2000). One of the actions by a leader is to motivate employees and especially if the leader wants the attitudes of employees towards their work and each other to improve as a way to create positive change. There are several ways to motivate the employees including use of reinforces like money or praise and also team building exercises outside work environment (Pedini January 2012). Another action can be to let employees participate in goal setting in the organization. By so doing they will own up the goal and work towards it more positively and not disgruntle like they do when goals that are unattainable are imposed on them. This will also ensure that the employees work more quickly to achieve this goal hence positive change in performance and production