Bookstore Bulletin

Recent works by McGill authors available at the Bookstore

Plainwater
Essays and poetry by Anne Carson, Department of Classics, Knopf.

Plainwater brings together five selections from Anne Carson's growing body of highly praised work. In succinct and astonishingly beautiful prose and verse, Carson exposes the fragile difference between "I" and "you," and between the classical and the modern, in a voice that shatters these boundaries with its integrity and clarity.
Anne Carson's writings exemplify both senses of the word 'essay': they are speculative ruminations about the world at large that also attempt to generate personal discourse, pressing the traditional form into new service.

Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity,
by James Tully, Department of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.

The first John Robert Seley lectures, given by James Tully in 1994, address the six types of demands for cultural recognition that constitute the most intractable conflicts of the present age: supranational associations, nationalism and federalism, linguistic and ethnic minorities, feminism, multiculturalism and aboriginal self-government.
Neither the prevailing schools of modern Western constitutionalism nor post-modern constitutionalism provide a just way of adjudicating such diverse claims to recognition because they rest on untenable assumptions inherited from the age of European imperialism. By means of a historical and critical survey of 400 years of European and non-European constitutionalism, with special attention to the American aboriginal peoples, Tully develops a post-imperial philosophy and practice of constitutionalism.

Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile
by Philip D. Oxhorn, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University Press.

This book focuses on the emergence of popular organizations among the Chilean urban poor under the Pinochet regime and their place in the larger political system. The author develops an original theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of popular organizations and their potential for forming a new social movement that can contribute to the democratization of civil society independently of a change in regime.
He then offers a comprehensive account of popular-sector organizational activity in Chile over the past 20 years. Paradoxically, the author finds that changes in the political system provided the necessary conditions under which a new social movement representing the urban poor could emerge, but simultaneously made such an emergence very difficult because of the problems that political parties faced after prolonged political repression.

Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions
edited by Don Bates, Dept. of Social Studies of Medicine, Cambridge University Press.

However much the three great traditions of medicine: Galenic, Chinese and Ayurvedic, differed from each other, they had one thing in common--scholarship. The foundational knowledge of each could only be acquired by careful study under teachers relying on ancient texts. Medical knowledge is special, operating as it does in the realm of the most fundamental human experiences--health, disease, suffering, birth and death--and the credibility of healers is of crucial importance. Because of this, scholarly medical knowledge offers a rich field for the study of different cultural practices in the legitimating of knowledge generally. The contributors to this volume are all specialists in the history or anthropology of these traditions, and their essays range from historical investigations to studies of present-day practices.

Nuremberg Forty Years Later: The Struggle Against Injustice in our Time
edited by Irwin Cotler, Institute of Comparative Law, McGill-Queen's University Press.

A collection of the proceedings of an international human rights conference marking the 40th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, Nuremberg Forty Years Later invites the reader to share in stimulating discussions by some of the leading human rights scholars and advocates of our day.

Plato on God as Nous: A monograph in the Journal of the History of Philosophy
by Stephen Menn, Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University Press.

This book is the first sustained modern investigation of Plato's theology. A central thesis of the book is that Plato had a theology--not just a mythology for the ideal city, not just the theory of forms or the theory of cosmic souls, but also, irreducible to any of these, an account of God as nous (Reason), the source of rational order both to souls and to the world of bodies.
The understanding of God as Reason, and of the world as governed directly or indirectly by Reason, is worked out in the dialogues of Plato's last period. These offer a strategy for explaining the physical world that goes beyond anything in the middle dialogues and gives the best starting point for understanding the cosmologies and theologies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and later ancient thinkers.