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Professor Bertram Schefold's recent papers on capital theory and the Cambridge critique argue that the very low likelihood of reswitching and reverse capital deepening that appears to emerge from empirical input–output tables is confirmed by theoretical results; these results, he concludes, largely rehabilitate traditional neoclassical views on capital and show that the Sraffian critics' insistence on reverse capital deepening as a fundamental criticism of neoclassical theory is misplaced. The present paper raises doubts about these arguments. In particular, Professor Schefold does not give adequate consideration to the 'supply-side' problems with the measurability and the given endowment of the traditional notion of capital as a single factor. On the empirical evidence based on input–output tables, I agree with Professor Kurz that it suffers from very serious weaknesses. The more recent argument for an extremely low likelihood of double switching, advanced in Schefold (2016 , 2018), appears criticisable too. Some weaknesses are also found in the recent argument jointly with Professor Götz Kersting on the 'poverty of production functions.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary critics often cast the English university novel as a traditionalist relic of the nineteenth century, one largely defensive of Oxbridge classics and masculinity. Yet the subgenre was a more subversive cultural nexus of sorts: an attempted reconciliation of novel form with the era's emerging and optically illusive technologies. These Bildungsromane , largely or exclusively set at universities, value letting undergraduates stare at and learn to enjoy outdoor vistas. In turn, they frequently compare those college landscapes to illusory devices like panoramas and magic lanterns. The fictions thus represent a struggle to bridge conventional Oxbridge education with innovative outdoor learning, and Romantic natural aesthetics with a visual subjectivism more akin to the early modernists. The essay begins by linking the so-called visual turn of nineteenth-century studies with the fewer book-length accounts of university fiction. The paper's second section then defines natural versus what I call illusory prospect gazing in English culture; where the former involved staring at outdoor vistas for pleasure, the latter offered this through indoor and often unsettlingly virtual landscapes. Finally, the essay turns to university novels, which combine both forms of prospect gazing for students' educative benefits. While earlier fictions liken college grounds to panoramas, later ones grow fascinated with photographic, phantasmagoric, and kaleidoscopic vistas. We can begin to re-evaluate the university novel, then, as one of the era's new optical technologies: it taught undergraduate characters and readers alike to visually enjoy and distrust their surroundings, and to confront the Romantic legacies and dizzying futures of novel form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In numerous historical and contemporary cases, and in various textual and lived traditions, several Hindu ascetics have been called avadhūta s. Yet, there is little scholarly research on this ascetic designation. Based on an 'iterative' textual search of early and medieval Hindu texts, this article examines the literary emergence and early reception of the avadhūta ascetic. I argue that the avadhūta label emerged in the late first-millennium CE and was institutionalised within the āśrama system in the early second-millennium CE. I further posit that the avadhūta 's emergence is probably connected to the systematisation of the jīvanmukti or liberation-while-living doctrine, and that the institutionalisation of the antinomian avadhūta ascetic as a legitimate saṃnyāsin or renouncer correlates with two interrelated factors: medieval advaitins defending the avadhūta from anti- jīvanmukti critics and the increasing theological importance of the āśrama system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oscar Wilde suggests that a book on which critics are agreed must be a 'very obvious and shallow production'. This review article on Anna Carabelli's 2021 book (a volume which helpfully draws together the fruits of her more than forty years' research into Keynes's method and ways of thought) involves five books that seem to invite the critical dissent that Wilde would have applauded. In her book, Carabelli displays her customary scholarship in writing about Keynes himself but is briskly dismissive of almost all commentators on his treatment of uncertainty and method. In what may be termed a fourth degree of comment - commenting on her comments on others' comments on Keynes - I take issue with some of her attacks, especially over the extent to which Keynes regarded convention as a stabilising factor and over whether Keynes is misinterpreted by 'followers of Hume'. A puzzle Carabelli seems to miss concerns which Hume is leading these 'followers' – in terms of current controversy, the 'old', the 'new' or perhaps yet another Hume. The nature of Hume's own response to his famous sceptical challenge to inductive reasoning is in dispute, and it is contentious which of his two major works better shows this. Also subject to fierce debate is the relation of the philosophy in Keynes's 1921 Treatise on Probability to the economics in his 1936 General Theory. Carabelli's detailed history of thought perspective on how Keynes's ideas grew encounters both rival historical slants and comment from a more purely analytical angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits that a novel and humanistic model of computing—'conversational computing'—would emerge in the 1960s which, despite being largely forgotten today, proved extremely influential in computing and wider culture. I examine the metaphor and model of conversation embedded in this earlier idea and trace the ways it was taken up in the humanities via examining, through his archives, the career of renowned literary critic and programmer, Hugh Kenner (1923–2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Knox's 1955 translation of the Latin Vulgate met with an overall lackluster reception. Yet critics were never able to agree on what was wrong, or even what the translation was like. Some found Knox modern, others old-fashioned. Some criticised him for departing from the Challoner Douay-Rheims, others for not translating the Hebrew and Greek. Through collation and close reading of reviews, this article traces the clash of expectations that led to the spotty reception of the Knox Bible. Though some took a conservative line, others an aggiornamento line, Knox's audience largely lacked a way to categorise his readable, rhetorical, designedly atemporal, and unashamedly individualist translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]