: Understanding the categories in terms of which people act is a basic tenet of anthropological research. This principle should apply to the study of scientists, yet analysts (social scientists and others) often do not address the content of science and, therefore, ignore a significant aspect of the conceptual framework within which scientists act. This paper examines, in the case of the development of the American secret nuclear surveillance system, the limitations of interpretations that do not adequately analyze such a (...) conceptual framework. It also examines the implications of this case for an anthropology of science. (shrink)

The PEIRCE EDITION contains large sections of previously unpublished material in addition to selected published works. Each volume includes a brief historical and biographical introduction, extensive editorial and textual notes, and a full chronological list of all of Peirce’s writings, published and unpublished, during the period covered.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dracula and Carmilla:Monsters and the MindBenson Saler and Charles A. ZieglerFollowing the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897, vampire narratives proliferated in Britain and the United States.1 While many twentieth century short stories, novels, plays, and films in both countries depart from Dracula in various ways, it is our impression that that workand its close derivatives retain pride of place in the popular imagination. Yet Dracula was (...) but one of several well-known vampire stories published in English during the nineteenth century, and scholars deem certain of the other tales to be of literary merit.In noting that, we raise this question: What is it about the plot and the characterization of vampires in Dracula that make it the most famous example of vampires in English fiction? Why, in particular, has it been more influential than Le Fanu's Carmilla which preceded it in time and is of equal or perhaps greater literary distinction?2 We address that question, and by doing so we hope to gain some insight into the attraction and persistence of vampire tales across time and cultures.We begin by sketching our approach to conceptualizing the category "vampire." Nina Auerbach, a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that "There is no such creature as 'The Vampire'; there are only vampires."3 That declaration is in keeping with her demonstration that in nineteenth and twentieth century British and American vampire novels, short stories, plays, and films, vampires vary greatly in behavior, in apparent motivation, and in cultural significance. Different social orders and different culturally supported sensibilities [End Page 218] and sensitivities, she persuasively argues, find expression in different sorts of vampires.We deem Auerbach's literary nominalism preferable to an essentialism that would govern vampiric class inclusion by insisting on some conjunction of necessary features or conditions. At the same time, however, we think that there is a better way of allowing for differences in conceptualizing vampires and in understanding their multi-faceted significance in British and American imaginings of the last two centuries. That way combines the recognition of family resemblances with insights derived from prototype theory in the cognitive sciences.A family resemblance approach can be quite liberal in what it includes as instantiations of the category "vampire." It can encompass not only such familiar (albeit different) figures as Ruthven, Varney, Carmilla, Dracula, and Lestat, but also others, including so-called "psychic vampires," who flourish not by sucking blood but by draining vitality, will, and even experience from their victims. Some may ask, does this not create a category that is so promiscuous in what it includes as to render the category analytically useless? No, we reply, once you couple family resemblance with insights from prototype theory.Prototype theory, narrowly described, attempts to account for "prototype effects." These "effects" are differences in the judgments that people render about how well different instances of a category exemplify the category. Thus, for instance, some people may judge apples and oranges to be clearer or better exemplars of the category "fruit" than olives. Similarly, some may judge robins and sparrows to be clearer or better exemplars of the category "bird" than penguins. Judgments can be explicitly given, or they can be inferred from the order of examples that people give or from their responses to lists of examples furnished by others. Prototype theorists call the adjudged clearest or "best" examples of categories "prototypes" or "the most prototypical exemplars."4 This approach celebrates centrality and periphery rather than essence and boundary in conceptualizing categories.5 It allows that some instantiations of a category may be deemed more central to the category than others. Thus in the case of vampires, Dracula is more central to the category than, say, the shape-shifting space alien who extracts salt from victims in an episode of Star Trek, First Generation. Auerbach recognizes that centrality when she refers to "Dracula's dominance in our century" (p. 111). We contend, moreover, that while Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire Carmilla is more prototypical—that is, an adjudged better exemplar of the category—than vampiric space aliens [End Page 219] and legions of psychic vampires, she is less... (shrink)

Charles A. Baylis; VII—Foundations For a Presentative Theory of Perception and Sensation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 19.

I consider a naturalistic approach to death, seeking a naturalistic or “functional” version of immortality. Making use of John Dewey and some other classical American philosophers, I first articulate the naturalism of this project. I then discuss what such naturalism means for understanding the self and its survival. Finally, I consider the existential question about to what extent such a view of immortality is satisfying.

This book is a clear, engaging, and ambitious introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey. First, a comment about the subtitle: while I recognize that it reflects the book’s inclusion in a series of “beginner’s guides,” the subtitle (“a beginner’s guide”) is unfortunate. The book is much more than that, and, as such, it is more valuable than the subtitle suggests. It is clearly of help to people new to Dewey, and yet it is also a significant resource for those (...) returning to Dewey in a variety of capacities. For example, this reviewer has found Hildebrand’s book helpful for thinking about pedagogical strategies for teaching Dewey in a recent seminar class (on James and Dewey), and I expect many other teachers will .. (shrink)

We pragmatists have within our tradition significant methodological resources for contributing to the understanding of the meaning of beliefs about the nature of death—a topic that has still not received enough attention. 1 I want here to articulate what crucial features of pragmatism I believe to be especially helpful for such a contribution, and to explain something about why they are helpful in this regard. As my title indicates, I am not drawing upon the neo-pragmatism of those such as Richard (...) Rorty, but instead upon some of pragmatism’s rich classical American manifestations, according to which theory must be connected to practice and experience (as opposed to neopragmatism’s linguistic preoccupation).2 In.. (shrink)

There has been little scholarly attention to the tension within Dewey’s comments on the ancients. On the one hand, Dewey’s polemics condemn the lasting influence of Greek philosophers as deleterious. He charges the Greeks with originating a quest (“the quest for certainty”) that has led Western philosophy into such dualisms as reason and emotion, mind and nature, individual and community, and theory and practice. On the other hand, Dewey often has many sympathetic things to say about the Greeks. Taking account (...) of the limited scholarship done on this topic, this essay articulates the dimensions of the tension and tries to put it into a Deweyan perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John DeweyCharles A. HobbsJohn Dewey. Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, 351 pp., index.John Dewey’s latest publication marks a watershed moment for scholarship in American philosophy, and, in addition to Dewey himself, we have editor Phillip Deen to thank for discovering it (among the Dewey papers in Special Collections at Morris Library of Southern Illinois (...) University) and editing it. We see Dewey late in life (early 1940s) engaged mainly in a critique of the modern, ancient, and (fragmentarily) medieval philosophical periods, which Dewey argues, are eras not nearly as distinct as traditional understanding admits. In the Introduction, Deen helpfully explains how we are now bequeathed incomplete but in most [End Page 122] cases quite robust chapter drafts that amount to another substantial work by Dewey. While published by Southern Illinois University Press, this volume is not itself part of The Collected Works of John Dewey. Still, the careful editing (of what are actually a number of manuscripts) is comparable in its excellence. There is also a well-done Index.The scope is twofold: retrospective and prospective. Chapters one through seven trace the development of so-called modern philosophy along with its central epistemological problem, with the aim being to demonstrate how thoroughly “unmodern” such philosophy has been. Then, chapters eight through fourteen constitute a genuinely modern approach that naturalistically and functionally undercuts the epistemic problem of subject/object and points to a revolution in the process of knowing.We turn to the retrospective, beginning in the first chapter with the acknowledgement that Dewey comes to philosophy itself as a kind of anthropologist, something we note as consistent with the influence of Franz Boas on Dewey (with whom Dewey was a colleague and intellectual ally at Columbia for about thirty-five years). This is further underscored by a lengthy quotation of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on the meaning of culture (p. 290). The ongoing history of philosophy is itself a cultural activity. Indeed, citing James, Dewey declares that “The sickliest way in which a student of philosophy can approach his subject-matter is that of a search for ultimate impersonal revelation of truth.” (p. 16) Rather, let the philosopher have the pragmatic attitude of openness “... to truth from whatever source it comes” (ibid).With that, Dewey once again turns to the Greeks, who initiated “The Discovery of Rational Discourse” (Ch. III) as underscored by the Socratic means of cooperative discourse, with the dialogues—not lectures—being evidence of the Athenian philosophical revolution in turning “from discussing nature and giving an account of it to the examination of the nature and procedure of discussion and report” (p. 38). Yet this project, despite its initial promise, failed for lack of a genuine logic of experimentation or inquiry. Then philosophy focused on going beyond the natural, beginning with the medieval “Search for Salvation” (Ch. IV, a significantly less developed and unified chapter draft). “Modern” philosophers then rightly replaced grand cosmic schemes with a focus on human nature (Ch. V), but they went too far with their introspective methods, gradually resulting in the same consequence supernaturalism had produced: a dualism of mind and nature, as if human nature is somehow not a part of nature. As we recall from Human Nature and Conduct (1922), human nature is not independent of but rather interdependent (or, using Dewey’s later term, transactional) with the rest of nature. The key is to avoid hypostatizing mind and better to talk of culture as nature. [End Page 123]With the Renaissance onward, humans have been “Wandering between Two Worlds” (Ch. VI), and endless arguments between “rationalists” and “empiricists” overlook what these camps share, namely a psychology assuming a fundamental split between subjective/objective and assumptions about certainty as founded upon various first principles or substances. The result is the stagnation of philosophy while science flourishes. Dewey cites Bertrand Russell as an example of continued insistence on such a priori principles (p. 106).We find ourselves in an epoch split between scientism and moral and religious fundamentalism, the result of a lingering tenacious investment in bad elements from ancient and medieval... (shrink)

We apply Hrushovski-Fraïssé's amalgamation procedure to obtain a theory of fields of prime characteristic of Morley rank 2 equipped with a definable additive subgroup of rank 1.

This paper describes one style of functional analysis commonly used in the neurosciences called task-bound functional analysis. The concept of function invoked by this style of analysis is distinctive in virtue of the dependence relations it bears to transient environmental properties. It is argued that task-bound functional analysis cannot explain the presence of structural properties in nervous systems. An alternative concept of neural function is introduced that draws on the theoretical neuroscience literature, and an argument is given to show that (...) this alternative concept of may help to overcome the explanatory limitations of task-bound functional analysis. (shrink)

Our recapitulation of the work by Howe et al. is a clear approval of the passages in which the talent concept is critically questioned. On the other hand, Howe et al. must themselves come to terms with most of the accusations they place at the door of talent researchers. The evidence they present to support the experience concept is lacking with respect to current theoretical and methodological standards.

This collection examines questions of medical accountability and ethics. It analyses how the criminal justice system regulates health care practice, and to what extent it is appropriate to use it as a tool to resolve ethical conflict in health care.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.