This Brief presents an historical investigation into the reaction between ferric ions and thiocyanate ions, which has been viewed in different ways throughout the last two centuries. Historically, the reaction was used in chemical analysis and to highlight the nature of chemical reactions, the laws of chemistry, models and theories of chemistry, chemical nomenclature, mathematics and data analysis, and instrumentation, which are important ingredients of what one might call the nature of chemistry. Using the history of the iron thiocyanate reaction (...) as a basis, the book’s main objective is to explore how chemistry develops its own knowledge base; how it assesses the reliability of that base; and how some important tools of the trade have been brought to bear on a chemical reaction to achieve understanding, a worthwhile goal of any historical investigation. (shrink)

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s death, a special annotated edition of his Christian classic, The Screwtape Letters, with notes and excerpts from his other works that help illuminate this diabolical masterpiece. Since its publication in 1942, The Screwtape Letters has sold millions of copies worldwide and is recognized as a milestone in the history of popular theology. A masterpiece of satire, it offers a sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the (...) vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to “Our Father Below.” At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, The Screwtape Letters comprises the correspondence of the worldly-wise devil Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. For the first time, The Screwtape Letters will be presented in full-text accompanied by helpful annotations in a striking two-color format. These annotations will give fans a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the popular book, providing background information, explanations of terms, historical significance, and excerpts from Lewis’s other works that more fully explain the ideas in this volume. For both expert Lewis fans and casual readers, The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition will be a beautiful and insightful guide to a beloved classic. (shrink)

It is hypothesized that iron from biological tissues, liberated during decay, may have played a role in inhibiting loss of anatomical information during fossilization of extinct organisms. Most tissues in the animal kingdom contain iron in different forms. A widely distributed iron‐bearing molecule is ferritin, a globular protein that contains iron crystallites in the form of ferrihydrite minerals. Iron concentrations in ferritin are high and ferrihydrites are extremely reactive. When ancient animals are decaying on the sea floor under anoxic environmental (...) conditions, ferrihydrites may initialize the selective replication of some tissues in pyrite FeS2. This model explains why some labile tissues are preserved, while other more resistant structures decay and are absent in many fossils. A major implication of this hypothesis is that structures described as brains in Cambrian arthropods are not fossilization artifacts, but are instead a source of information on anatomical evolution at the dawn of complex animal life. (shrink)

This book examines the history of the concept of irony from the first appearance of?eironeia? in Plato to the modern era. It isolates and discusses the basic features of irony and the variable features that determine the kind and in part the effect or quality. It distinguishes carefully between the two main types : instrumental irony (of which verbal irony is the most common form) and observable irony (which includes dramatic irony, irony of events, general irony and other situational ironies). (...) A distinction is also drawn between open and closed irony. (shrink)

There are inherent difficulties in a subject like chemistry particularly the notion of a chemical reaction. In this paper the difficulties are discussed from a teaching and learning perspective and from a history of chemistry perspective. Three teaching/learning studies of the incompleteness of the iron thiocyanate reaction in chemical equilibrium are reviewed and it is shown that a recent historical study of the iron thiocyanate reaction has the potential to challenge the interpretation of the incompleteness of the reaction. This establishes (...) a controversial context where students can be introduced to epistemic thinking, that is, how to interrogate chemistry data and form a conclusion which resonates with what we know about the nature of science. A curriculum suggestion for pre-service chemistry teachers is provided. (shrink)

BackgroundIn research ethics, the most basic question would always be, “which is an ethical issue, which is not?” Interestingly, depending on which ethics guideline we consult, we may have various answers to this question. Though we already have several international ethics guidelines for biomedical research involving human participants, ironically, we do not have a harmonized document which tells us what these various guidelines say and shows us the areas of consensus. In this manuscript, we attempted to do just that.MethodsWe extracted (...) the imperatives from five internationally-known ethics guidelines and took note where the imperatives came from. In doing so, we gathered data on how many guidelines support a specific imperative.ResultsWe found that there is no consensus on the majority of the imperatives and that in only 8.2 % of the imperatives were there at least moderate consensus. Of the 12 clusters, Informed Consent has the highest level of consensus and Research Collaboration and Regulatory Sanctions have the least.ConclusionThere was a lack of consensus in the majority of imperatives from the five internationally-known ethics guidelines. This may be partly explained by the differences among the guidelines in terms of their levels of specification as well as conceptual/ideological differences. (shrink)

Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its (...) "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities—ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores—with the help of Plato—the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony. (shrink)

In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...) that, ironically enough, this metaphysical assumption is implicitly shared by all the above mentioned alternatives to Emergentism. The current article concludes that the notion of organization by itself is not enough, and that ontological emergence can only be justified by assuming a relational ontological perspective that, in opposition both to atomism and holism, defends that the existence-conditions, the identity and the causal behavior of any emergent systemic property can only be conceived, and explained, as constructed by and through specific networks of qualitatively transformative relational processes that occur between the system’s components and between the system and its environment. Additionally, I try to explain how one can make sense of the idea that an emergent phenomenon is both dependent on, and autonomous from, its emergence base. (shrink)

Mimesis or imitation comes in many forms, from animal and plant mimicry to artistic copies 'from life'. This book offers eighteen essays addressing mimesis from diverse perspectives. From the recreation of galaxies to Iron Age torcs, from counterfeit dragons to modern waxworks, each chapter explores facets of material mimesis from prehistory to the present day. The Matter of Mimesis invites readers to compare practices of imitating, faking, and synthesising materials and objects in nature, art and science, raising questions about skills, (...) techniques and politics of making that transcend historical and disciplinary boundaries and inform both our past and future worlds. (shrink)

Deficits in social cognition and more specifically in communication have an important impact on the real-life functioning of people with schizophrenia. In particular, patients have severe problems in communicative-pragmatics, for example, in correctly inferring the speaker’s communicative intention in everyday conversational interactions. This limit is associated with morphological and functional alteration of the left middle temporal gyrus, a cerebral area involved in various communicative processes, in particular in the distinction of ironic communicative intention from sincere and deceitful ones. We performed (...) an fMRI study on 20 patients with SZ and 20 matched healthy controls while performing a pragmatic task testing the comprehension of sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative intentions. We considered the L-MTG as the region of interest. SZ patients showed difficulties in the correct comprehension of all types of communicative intentions and, when correctly answering to the task, they exhibited a higher activation of the L-MTG, as compared to HC, under all experimental conditions. This greater involvement of the L-MTG in the group of patients could depend on different factors, such as the increasing inferential effort required in correctly understanding the speaker’s communicative intentions, and the higher integrative semantic processes involved in sentence processing. Future studies with a larger sample size and functional connectivity analysis are needed to study deeper the specific role of the L-MTG in pragmatic processes in SZ, also in relation to other brain areas. (shrink)

Mad about it they still were, in 1926, when Hemingway's splendid spoofing appeared in The Sun Also Rises. But it was not everybody who had been responsible. It was mainly Anatole France, abetted by his almost unanimously enthusiastic critics. And of all his works, the one that must have seemed to fit the formula best was Thaïs, already a quarter of a century old when Jake Barnes learned of irony and pity. It is not a bad formula for the effect (...) of Thaïs, as formulas go. It is at least as useful—and at least as misleading—as "pity and fear" for tragedy. There is, however, a surprising difference. If I tell you the story of any classical tragedy, even in very brief form, you will know at once why someone might talk about that story using the terms "pity" and "fear." But if I tell you of the priest who lost his soul converting the prostitute, you will not be able to predict any determinate reaction—except perhaps that the story will have for everyone a slight bit of ironic wonder at the grand reversal. In other words, a teller will be able to turn such material almost any direction he chooses, making it into a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, a celebration of God's wonder and mystery—or a tale playing with pity and irony. Wayne C. Booth's most recent books are A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. He is now completing a book on critical warfare and critical pluralism . A version of one chapter from that book, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," will appear in the Spring issue of Critical Inquiry. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" , "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" , "Ten Literal ‘Theses’" , with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" , and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979". (shrink)

Farmers in developed countries have established various tillage practices for crop production. These include plowing, disking, subsoiling, harrowing, field cultivating, rotary hoeing, and row-crop cultivating. But these conventional tillage practices necessitate the use of heavy equipment that often causes soil compaction, impairs soil physical conditions, and creates conditions leading to soil erosion. Many Western countries, studying their conventional tillage systems through the new perspective of sustainable approaches to agriculture, are developing new tillage practices, called conservation tillage, which limit tillage to (...) essential operations and prevent damage to soil. The majority of the small-scale farmers in developing countries use indigenous tillage systems. These are low-cost, locally adapted technologies that reflect considerable knowledge of sustainable agriculture. Ironically, the new conservation tillage systems currently being developed in the West have many characteristics of indigenous tillage systems. This paper compares conventional, conservation, and indigenous tillage practices, using examples from the United States and India, and concludes that, for sustainable food production, indigenous tillage practices in developing countries should continue to be used. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The common claim that American foreign policy is “imperial” is contradicted by the fact that the actual, definable historical empires have characteristically exercised formal, as well as decisive, control over their peripheral dependencies—properties that the keenest analysts do not ascribe to the geopolitical system that has been constructed by the United States. Why, then, the ascription of “empire” to the United States? One reason is to condemn American foreign policy by linking it to the unjust, destructive, and self‐destructive tendencies (...) that are held to be inherent in a nation’s quest for, and maintenance of, “empire.” The variant of this anti‐imperial thesis that has been the special province of certain conservatives and libertarians appropriates the “empire” thesis to invent non‐security motives for American foreign policies, and correspondingly to denigrate security threats to the United States. Yet—ironically—as with the more characteristic left‐wing anti‐imperialism, the conservative‐libertarian version exemplifies a cultural dimension of the strategic situation of the United States: Far from being an “empire,” or even an accomplished hegemon, America is better described (metaphorically) as the object of a multi‐pronged “siege.”. (shrink)

Sir—In their editorial, Hall, Carter & Morley [1] present an incorrect interpretation of my central argument. The point of my paper [2] is that there are solid reasons to suspect that the capacity of heroin addicts to consent to heroin therapy is compromised because of their addiction. As one medical commentator on my paper states, if active heroin addicts can give voluntary and competent consent to heroin therapy without any problems, then we need a new conceptualization of addiction: they are (...) not addicted, almost by definition [3]. Yet obviously there are problems and grey zones. The solution is to investigate the issue empirically in order to determine the extent of the problem. (As we have done for consent to research on depression and other mental illnesses.) Ultimately, the question can only be solved on a case by case basis, using standardized assessment tools adapted for this purpose. The MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool (MaCAT‐T) is the particular assessment tool I chose to discuss. [4] It is the most promising candidate available, and it has proved its merits in the areas of depression and schizophrenia. -/- At no point do I condemn heroin therapy and endorse an abstinence model of treatment, as the authors state. On the contrary, I note the success of heroin therapy and make suggestions about how to facilitate the consent process. Ironically, it may be Hall et al . who have oversimplified the issues. What we need here are empirical studies on the decisional capacity of heroin addicts to consent to heroin therapy. Only then will we be able to refute the naive view they have no ‘free will’, or say how much they have; but really my paper is not about ‘free will’ at all. This is a philosophical concept. The topic I chose to discuss is ‘decisional capacity’, also called ‘mental competence’. This is a clinical concept with complex legal and ethical associations that often vary across jurisdictions. My point was that although the Swiss Heroin Trials were approved in Europe, they probably would not be approved in Canada or the United States under existing regulations. Interested readers might want to consider the wide variety of reactions to my paper, published in the same issue [5]. Unfortunately, the editorial by Hall et al . does little to advance this debate. (shrink)