Weeding... It Isn\u27t Just For Gardens

Sorry, I haven’t posted in a while; I’ve been holding out until I got to the finishing stages of the Collection Development project. Yes, that’s right, for the past couple of weeks, when I was pacing up and down the stacks on the second floor, I was not actually going crazy. [excerpt

The Desperate Rebels of Shimabara: The Economic and Political Persecutions And the Tradition of Peasant Revolt

The Shimabara Rebellion has been studied throughout history by historians of East Asia. Originally conceived by both Japanese and Western scholars as a religious revolt against the anti-Christian Tokugawa government, later scholars contended that the Rebellion was a demonstration by the mistreated and impoverished and only tacitly related to Christian influences. This paper sets out to build on that narrative and to show the connection between the Christian resistance to the Tokugawa government and the movement of impoverished and desperate peasants, pushed to the brink of existence. Furthermore, this paper hopes to explore the goals of the Rebellion and establish the Shimabara Rebellion within the context of other rebellions during the Tokugawa era

On the Web-WorldCat, Digital Publications, and New Editions

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the warmer weather! Despite the real arrival of spring and sun, the Reference Desk is expecting a huge pick-up in the library and in citation and research questions as we move towards the end of the semester and the due dates for final research papers. Apart from regular work at the Desk, I am still working on the Collection Development Project, now in the online section of the project. I’ve been working a lot with MUSCAT and WorldCat, trying to discover how many copies of the Parkin books are available in other libraries and to see how rare each book is. Some of the books could only be found in ten or so other libraries worldwide! [excerpt

The open-endedness objection against sophisticated dispositionalism

Sophisticated dispositionalism proposes a naturalist reduction of mental content by claiming that the semantic content of a mental symbol is determined by the causes of the occurrence of this symbol under ideal conditions, i.e., conditions under which only the referent of a symbol can cause its tokening. However, Paul Boghossian developed the open-endedness objection in order to show that it is not possible to specify these ideal conditions in non-semantic terms, entailing that the naturalist reduction of mental content proposed by sophisticated dispositionalism is not viable. My goal in this paper is to argue that the open-endedness objection is flawed