Studies of Y chromosome evolution often emphasize gene loss, but this loss has been counterbalanced by addition of new genes. The DAZ genes, which are critical to human spermatogenesis, were acquired by the Y chromosome in the ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes. We and our colleagues recently sequenced the rhesus macaque Y chromosome, and comparison of this sequence to human and chimpanzee enables us to reconstruct much of the evolutionary history of DAZ. We report that DAZ arrived on (...) the Y chromosome about 38 million years ago via the transposition of at least 1.1 megabases of autosomal DNA. This transposition also brought five additional genes to the Y chromosome, but all five genes were subsequently lost through mutation or deletion. As the only surviving gene, DAZ experienced extensive restructuring, including intragenic amplification and gene duplication, and has been the target of positive selection in the chimpanzee lineage.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Should Y stay or should Y go: The evolution of non‐recombining sex chromosomes Abstract. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 245-260, June 2022.

Page's proposal to stipulate representations in which individual units correspond to meaningful entities is too unconstrained to support effective theorizing. An approach combining general computational principles with domain-specific assumptions, in which learning is used to discover representations that are effective in solving tasks, provides more insight into why cognitive and neural systems are organized the way they are.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 5, Page 20-22, May 2012.

A critical edition and facing-page translation, accompanied by substantial analytical introduction and notes, of Perspectiva by Roger Bacon, a foundational text of modern optics written in about 1260, which defined the subject for the next 350 years.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:53. AN INDEX OF HUME'S REFERENCES IN A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE The index below of Hume's references in the Treatise te the works of other authors excludes those which are accurate and full in his text (of which there are few) and those which are so general, e.g., to Spinoza's atheism, that no passage is specifiable. Hume mentions other writings, for which this index is compiled, in several (...) different ways. Occasionally he mentions the author's name, the title of his book and gives a reference which is less specific than it could be. These have been identified. Often he mentions an author's name only, e.g., de Retz, and in such cases the fullest possible reference has been given. One of Hume's notable intellectual gifts was his ability to distil several pages of a book into one or two sentences of crisp and accurate synthesis. (This skill is most apparent in his summaries of articles in Bayle' s Dictionary in his "Notes on Philosophy", of which the manuscript is in the Royal Society of Edinburgh Library.) In these instances, page references are impossible and the closest indication one can give is a section or chapter. Some of his references are anonymous, e.g., as an 'elegant writer' says, and so are some quotations. These have been identified with one exception. One anonymous reference (number 24 below) requires explanation because it is both anachronistic and interesting. Hume refers to an observation by "a late eminent philosopher". It is anachronistic because the book to which he refers was published after the Treatise; it is interesting because it provides further evidence of Hutcheson's influence on Hume and the latter' s regard for him. The explanation, for Hutcheson was still alive when Vol.11 of the Treatise appeared in 1739, is that 'late' is here being used in the sense of 'recent' - Hutcheson himself uses the word in the same way in referring to Mandeville when the latter was 54. alive. (An enquiry concerning moral good and evil. Section 1, VI.) Further, the System circulated widely among Hutcheson's friends in Scotland and over so many years that it finally appeared posthumously. That Hume could not cite a published work also accounts for the anonymity of the reference to someone he admired. It is often impossible to determine in which language or in which edition Hume read a particular author. Where there is evidence as to which language he used, the title has been given in that language. There are now so many extant editions of the Treatise that Volume, Part, Chapter and Section references are given, as well as the pagination of Selby-Bigge' s edition, so that readers of other editions may be able to use the index. 1.Vol. 1. Title-page. Tacitus, The Histories, Bk. I. 1. 2.Part 1, Sect. 1, p. 2, n. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. I, Chap. I, 8. 3.Sect. VII, p. 17, n. George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introductixi, Sect. 7, e_t seq. 4.Part II, Sect. II, p. 30, n. Nicolas de Malezieu, Elementa Geometrica. 5.Sect. Ill, p. 35, n. John Locke, Essay, Bk. II, Chap. XIV. 6.Sect. IV, p. 43, n. Antoine Arnauld, La logique ou l'art de penser. Part I, Chap. 5. (In some editions Pierre Nicole is named as co-author. The book is also known as the Port Royal Logic). 7.Sect. IV, p. 46, n. Isaac Barrow, Mathematical Lectures. 8.Part III, Sect. Ill, p. 80, n. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, Part Second, Chap. 9. And Tripos : in Three Discourse. Ill, of Liberty and Necessity. 55. Sect. Ill, p. 80, n. e.g., Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Props. I-III, et. seq. 10.Sect. Ill, p. 81, n. John Locke, Essay, Bk. IV, Chap. X. 11.Sect. VIII, p. 100 and appendix Vol. Ill, p. 630. Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, Bk. V. 1.2. 12.Sect. XIII, p. 153. Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires, Bk. III. The second 'observation' is from Book... (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 96-98.

This work resulted from a conference held in 2003 that was jointly sponsored by the Rockefeller Archive Center and Quinnipiac University. Drawing upon perspectives from history, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as public health and medicine, the authors in this volume examine and critique the role of Foundations, most prominently the Rockefeller Foundation, in promoting and expanding the development of Western medicine around the world during the 20th century. The first half of the book examines the historical involvement (...) of philanthropic foundations in public heath, basic medical research, and related social and political issues. These studies range from an examination of the Rockefeller's Foundation's anti-malaria campaigns to the involvement of Foundations in promoting eugenic ideology and population control. The second half of the book considers current situations in which philanthropic foundations are active in promoting public health and westernized medicine, including consideration of the fight against AIDS in Africa, the resurgence of tuberculosis as a major public health threat, and the ongoing war against malaria. Finally, the book concludes with thoughts on the future of health, disease, and public health by Peter C. Goldmark, Jr., a former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. By considering issues of public health and health policy from a wide range of perspectives, this book seeks to contribute both to our understanding of the past successes and failures of growing dominance of Westernized medicine over global health, and to consider present and future possibilities for improving the delivery of health services to the population of the world. (shrink)

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews (...) which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 4, Page 1-2, April 2012.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 32-40, March‐April 2022.

The latest collection of essays from the cutting edge of psychedelic research, based on talks given by their authors at Breaking Convention 2019, held at The University of Greenwich, London. The largest symposium of its kind, Breaking Convention features more than 120 academic presentations biennially, and is widely regarded as the foremost global platform for serious research into psychedelic science and culture. Within these pages are essays demonstrating a shift in psychedelia. Topics include sustainability, death, the shadow, archetypes, conservation, history, (...) phenomenology, war, power, madness, and the marriage of energy and matter. An eclectic collection that reflects the diverse array of speakers that present at Breaking Convention, and echoes the shifts currently occurring in psychedelia: a build up of tension before new ground is created. (shrink)

A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining a one-to-one (...) correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:150. HUME AND COLLINS ON MIRACLES Some portions of 18th century intellectual history seem like puzzles of which the most important pieces are missing. In some lucky instances the pieces have not been lost altogether but only misplaced in some other puzzle, so that once this is recognised it is possible to solve both puzzles at once. The following, I believe, may comprise one such case. In his erudite (...) History of Freethought (London 1936), p. 757, J. M. Robertson presents us with the first puzzle:...seven years before the issue of Hume's Essay on Miracles, we find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note, to Book II of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero's De Natura Deorum. The passage is worth comparing with Hume: "Hence we see what little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div i, c. xvii] are well attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people, believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been, which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be." M. Tullius Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods... with Notes, London, 1741, p. 85. The ascription to Thomas Francklin seems to have been drawn primarily from the "new edition" (London: T. Davies, 1775), on the title-page of which the translation and notes are said to be "By the Rev. Dr. Francklin". Also relevant to 151!. this attribution are these two facts: (1) that Thomas Francklin' s father, Richard Francklin, originally printed the book in 1741, and (2) that Thomas later translated other classical authors into English, notably Sophocles in 1759. But it is surely puzzling that Thomas, who in 1741 was barely twenty years old, and soon to be ordained and later made a Doctor of Divinity, should anticipate Hume's famous criticism of miracles. Consider now the second puzzle. It concerns Anthony Collins, the "Goliath of Freethinking" - as T. H. Huxley called him. In his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (London, 1727) Collins promised a discourse on miracles "which is almost transcribed" (p. 439); and, indeed, it was about time, since by that date Collins had attacked nearly every other part of the Christian edifice. But no such work ever appeared in Collins' s lifetime. Nor is this the only book which Collins came close to publishing. From private letters of Collins' s in the British Library (MS 4282) we learn that he planned to publish an annotated translation of two of Cicero's writings. Thus in a letter of 26 September 1721 he speaks of "publishing my translation of Cicero's books of ye Nature of the Gods and of Divination" For "Nothing [he writes in the same letter] can more tend to promote good sense in the world than some of his [Cicero's] Philosophical Works; which are applicable to all sorts of folly and superstition by those who have Eyes to see and Ears to hear." The reader will now probably guess my drift: Collins was responsible for the 1741 edition of Cicero and its acute comment on miracles. But why, it will be asked, has this connection not been made before? The obvious answer is that since Collins died in 1729 twelve years separated his name from the 1741 edition. The evidence which firmly connects him with it is to be found (a) on the last page (279) of his Historical and Critical Essay on the Thirty Nine Articles (London 1724): "Speedily will be published, Cicero's Treatises of the 152. Nature of the Gods and of Divination. Translated into english [sic], with annotations. In two volumes." and (b) on the title-page. For the Historical and Critical Essay was printed by none other than R. Francklin, the very one who printed the 1741 edition of Cicero. That this is no coincidence - and Richard Francklin was to print... (shrink)

Robert Brandom's latest book, the product of his John Locke lectures in Oxford in 2006, is a return to the philosophy of language and is easily read as a continuation and development of the views defended in Making it Explicit . The text of the lectures is presented much as they were delivered, but it contains an ‘Afterword’ of more than 30 pages which responds to questions raised when he gave the lectures, and also when they were subsequently delivered in (...) Prague the following year. The published text also contains relatively technical appendices to two of the lectures.The individual lectures engage with some important and difficult issues, often ones that were explored in detail in the earlier book. However, these discussions are located within a broader meta-philosophical context, and it says something about the abstract and difficult character of these views that they provide the main subject matter of the Afterword. This framework affects how we should understand the relations between this book and Making It Explicit too. Although most of the detailed discussions happily belong within the general project of the earlier book, they are offered as illustrations of a framework that is independent of this project. Indeed, Brandom suggests that defenders of the semantic views of David Lewis, for example, could embrace his main message as well as those who favour Brandom's own form of pragmatism.Neo-pragmatist philosophers such as Brandom's teacher, Richard Rorty, often present themselves as rejecting the analytic tradition in philosophy. When Brandom describes the ‘pragmatist challenge’ to the ‘classical project of analysis’, he appeals to the criticisms found in the work of Wittgenstein and Sellars that are often appealed to by the critics of the analytic tradition. The message of the new book is that the views he has built on this …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 287-292 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of (...) Taoist Mysticism. By Harold D. Roth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xv + 275 pp. Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China. By Livia Kohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xii + 281 pp. Taoist Tradition and Change: The Story of the Complete Perfection Sect in Hong Kong. By Bartholomew P. M. Tsui. Hong Kong: Chinese Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 1991. 207 pp. Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China. By Kenneth Dean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii + 406 pp. Buddhism in China has many forms: sometimes functioning as a foreign object provoking attraction, rivalry, or persecution, and at other times being so integrated that it epitomized or completed Chinese culture. Although the elite monastic community maintained its distinctive Buddhist identity throughout its history, the story of the various forms of popular appropriation of Buddhist elements beyond the monastic [End Page 287] walls is just beginning to be studied. Probably the most important arena where Buddhism became part of Chinese culture is its mixture with Daoist practice, but only in the 1990s have Daoist studies evolved to the point where the Buddhist presence can be traced and evaluated. The four books listed above are among a shelf-full of new studies on Daoism that offer resources for exploring the complex relationships among Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese culture.The study of the Inner Training by Harold Roth clarifies a core practice within early Daoism that was later integrated--usually without acknowledgment--as a central practice by both Confucianists and Buddhists, especially Ch'an. In contrast, the definitive study by Livia Kohn of the Xiaodao lun shows a carefully constructed Buddhist attack on Daoist scriptures. During the last millennium, the two most influential integrations of the three religions--Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism--were achieved by Wang Chong-yang (1113-1170) and Lin Zhao-en (1517-1598). Bartholomew Tsui offers an important field study of the liturgical practices of the contemporary followers of Wang as embodied in Hong Kong temples of Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, while Kenneth Dean provides a massive field report of over one thousand temples of the Xiajiao movement in contemporary Fujian Province that revere the teachings of Lin Zhao-en as Lord of the Three-in-One. All four books provide rich materials for reflecting on interreligious encounter in China.The archaeological discovery of lost Chinese texts has made clear that the Lao-tzu is no earlier than the beginning of the third century b.C.E. and did not exist at the time of Confucius. Harold Roth's book argues that earlier than the book of Lao-tzu there was a movement of internal cultivation that was first expressed in two fourth-century b.C.E. texts, the first seven chapters of Chuang-tzu and a text found among the seventy-six texts in the Kuan-tzu that Roth calls Inner Training. Roth proposes that this latter text constitutes the "original Tao" in the sense that it is the core practice embodied in those thinkers who were grouped together by later historians. Roth observes that the earliest identification of a Daoist school (daojia) by Ssu-ma T'an about 110 b.C.E. emphasized techniques or practices, "not the philosophies that developed along with them and that support them.... Techniques must be seen as a way to define pre... (shrink)

The October 2016 publication of the 2015 convegno on Peter of John Olivi begins with a fine survey of Provence and Languedoc in Olivi's time. J. Chiffoleau, with C. Lenoble, supplies the reader with much detail and some summary, along with abundant reference, on Olivi's home turf. In the come and go of life religious and lay, Olivi saw to critical support for business while trying to stabilize Franciscan life. He did very well by both. Chiffoleau finishes his pages on (...) Olivi's days by suggesting that Olivi had better to do around Narbonne than in Paris.Tiziana Suarez-Nani offers thoughts and examples of Peter Olivi's "spiritual philosophy". That he offers Aristotle little esteem we know; that Olivi... (shrink)

La narration de l’histoire du problème des universaux souffre d’une importante lacune : on ne sait rien du traitement que ce problème a reçu de la part de ceux qui faisaient profession de philosopher à l’Université de Paris entre 1230 et 1260. C’est à ce deficit de savoir que le présent ouvrage s’attaque. Il se déploie en trois dimensions. En premier lieu, nous offrons une édition critique et une traduction française sectorielles d’un commentaire latin sur l’Isogoge de Porphyre ayant pour (...) auteur un dénommé Robertus Anglicus qui, comme nous le montrons, fut magister artium à Paris aux alentours de 1250. En deuxième lieu, nous sondons l’architectonique de ce texte et des écrits parallèles que rédigèrent des philosophes contemporains, nommément Jean le Page, Nicolas de Paris et Robert Kilwardby. Finalement, par l’entremise d’une étude comparative qui met à profit des œuvres inédites de ces artiens, nous explicitons, interprétons et évaluons les schèmes de lecture, les séquences argumentatives et les composantes doctrinales qui forment la “moelle” philosophique du commentaire isagogique de Robertus Anglicus. (shrink)

En 1938, lorsque le philosophe Étienne Souriau dresse l'inventaire des différents modes d'existence qui peuplent le monde, une classe d'êtres retient particulièrement son attention : les êtres virtuels. Ce sont toutes les potentialités qui accompagnent les existences comme des dimensions d'elles-mêmes, ce qu'elles pourraient être si... Ce ne sont pas de simples possibles, car les virtuels existent à leur manière. Le problème, c'est qu'ils manquent de réalité, comme s'il n'y avait pas de place pour eux dans le monde réel. Celui (...) qui veut les faire exister davantage, leur donner "plus" de réalité n'est pas seulement un créateur, c'est un avocat. Il lutte pour leur "droit" à exister davantage, à occuper légitimement une place dans ce monde. Toute création n'est-elle pas un plaidoyer en faveur des nouvelles existences qu'elle crée? N'est-ce pas le problème de toutes les existences, dès lors qu'elles sont privées du droit d'exister de telle ou telle manière? C'est l'interrogation qui parcourt ce livre, au croisement de l'existence, de l'art et du droit."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In editing Plato's Sophist for the new OCT vol. I, ed. E. A. Duke, W. F. Hicken, W. S. M. Nicoll, D. B. Robinson, and J. C. G. Strachan , there was less chance of giving novel information about W = Vind. Supp. Gr. 7 for this dialogue than for others in the volume, since Apelt's edition of 1897 was used by Burnet in 1900 and was based on Apelt's own collation of W. The result was better than the somewhat (...) confused information printed by Burnet, even in his 1905 reprint, for W for the other dialogues in vol. I. But in the Sophist as elsewhere in vol. I collations largely due to Dr W. S. M. Nicoll added new facts about all of BDTWP and their correctors, and the search for testimonia largely carried out by Dr E. A. Duke added new facts in that area. A reviewer counts 66 changes in our text of the Sophist, which may perhaps be a slight over-estimate. Classification of changes as substantive or as falling into different groups is sometimes difficult, but I think plausible figures are as follows. We have in 25 places made a different choice of readings from the primary mss. and testimonia. We have printed conjectures where Burnet kept a ms. reading in 17 places, but conversely we have reverted to a ms. reading where Burnet had a conjecture in 8 places. We have printed alternative conjectures to conjectures adopted by Burnet in 6 places. So we have actually departed from the primary sources on at most 9 more occasions overall than Burnet. What must be noted is that Burnet had already printed conjectures on something like 87 occasions , so our percentage addition to Burnet's departures from the primary sources is modest. Moreover Burnet printed about 25 readings from testimonia; we have followed him in 20 or so of these cases, and this in turn implies that the primary mss. are in error at these further 20 places. It needs to be underlined that though Burnet undoubtedly deserved to be regarded as a safe and cautious editor, nevertheless he departed from the primary mss. on average about twice per Stephanus page in this dialogue. Sometimes, of course, testimonia showed him right to do this, but testimonia cover only a quite small part of this dialogue. Otherwise Burnet accepted almost 90 conjectures. For the Politicus the figures are fairly similar; Burnet accepted 22 Byzantine conjectures and 35–40 more modern ones. The new OCT there adds 15 or so more conjectures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Propaedeutic to Walter BenjaminDavid Socher (bio)I took the picture—the Marines took Iwo Jima.—Joe Rosenthal (1912-2006)The Emerson College Web site on Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction1 nicely animates some ideas of the essay. One such idea is the following: To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. When Benjamin wrote this (...) essay and this maxim, Norman Rockwell had been illustrating magazine covers for both Boy's Life and the Saturday Evening Post for several years. Rockwell, who also made paintings for advertisements, said he didn't "want to paint for the few who can see a canvas in a museum." He wanted his "pictures to be published," exemplifying Benjamin's point.2 Wood engravings have been around for a thousand years and coins with portraits for two thousand. I don't mention these old examples to dispute Benjamin's point—certainly to an ever-greater degree the modern age designs for reproducibility. And Benjamin himself at the outset mentions the stampings, coins, and terra cottas of the Greeks as ancient cases of reproduction of a work of art. I merely intend to highlight the distinction between creating a print and painting a painting or drawing a drawing. In the latter cases the artist's goal is to produce one particular physical surface. We often imbue this surface with what Benjamin called an aura.3 Collectors of Rockwell Post covers don't have Rockwell's auras,4 and even less so those who have and hang reproductions of such covers. The making of prints has its own cachet, however. Although he is far from a typical printmaker, M. C. Escher here expresses a thought applicable to all printmakers: "The printmaker has [End Page 1] something of the minstrel spirit; he sings, and in every print … he repeats his song over and over again."5As is usual with such illustrations, Rockwell's paintings were put on magazine covers by photographic processes. Rockwell, of course, is not a photographer. His name will not be included in the history of photography. Why is it even worth stating such more-than-obvious observations? Because Benjamin seems to me to be mixed up about photography and the mix-up pervades his essay, even including his very title. Getting clear about exactly what photography is will help untangle things. Therefore, before turning to Benjamin's text, allow me a few words on photography.It is hard to overstate the importance of photography. About his own parents, whom he had never seen, Dickens's Pip says, he "never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs)."6 Many school textbooks feature photos of children in a classroom, but often these are staged photos not actually taken in a classroom. At least one textbook publisher keeps props, including a wheelchair to take photos of "Able bodied children selected through modeling agencies [posing] in the wheelchair."7 Well, it's hard to get disabled children to serve as models, and in this way the publisher meets his disability quota. In such a case the photo is not doctored. It does picture the event in front of the camera, although unknown to the student, the picture is staged and the pictured student is neither in a classroom, nor disabled. This is a small deception; it is, however, a greater deception than is normal for, say, clothing catalogues. In such a catalogue all know that the model photographed is not actually skiing or chopping wood, although the model is so pictured. In the textbook an able-bodied child is presented as a disabled one, however, no direct falsehoods are being taught and no picture is falsely captioned. On the other hand, when a news agency doctors, falsely captions, or stages a picture, the deception is great.Newspapermen and newspaperwomen know well that photo-ops and managed news are cases where the tail wags the dog inasmuch as the event itself was only created for the sake of the picture. Somewhat similarly, staged wedding photos and other... (shrink)

"Absolu" n'est peut-être pas le dernier mot d'un discours qui se refuserait d'aller plus loin, ni le terme ultime d'une pensée hésitant à prolonger son audace spéculative. L'originalité de l'œuvre de Claude Bruaire (1932-1986) est d'avoir résolument entrepris l'approfondissement philosophique du concept d'absolu. Si "Dieu est celui avec lequel on n'en finit pas", c'est d'abord parce qu'il libère une puissance d'affirmation que la rationalité, dès lors, s'efforce de recueillir - en cette épiphanie, à la suscitation de la Révélation même, la (...) tâche est infinie. Sur le chemin de cet approfondissement, le présent ouvrage montre que la catégorie de "liberté", décisive, est la pièce maîtresse du dispositif bruairien : "Si l'absolu n'est pas absolument libre, alors il n'est pas absolument absolu, donc pas absolu". Mais peut-on dire de Dieu qu'il est libre sans questionner la liberté propre à l'homme? Entre l'absolue liberté de l'absolu et la difficile liberté de l'homme, laquelle a la priorité? Quelle est ici la structure du concept de liberté, et quelle en est la logique interne, pour qu'un même nom convienne et à l'homme et à l'absolu? Au long de son œuvre aussi audacieuse qu'exigeante, l'enseignement de Bruaire est constant : renouveler l'affirmation de Dieu, c'est penser la liberté de l'homme, au point de mesurer combien la liberté de l'homme est donnée à elle-même."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

« Et soudain, devant l'injonction à répondre, s'imposa à moi la possibilité d'une solution : tourner, comme souvent, la faiblesse en force, l'échec en programme. "Tu te souviens que Spinoza dit quelque part que les choses sont produites par Dieu avec la même nécessité qu'il résulte de l'essence d'un triangle que ses angles sont égaux à deux droits. Nous savons aujourd'hui que cette prétendue 'nécessité' découle d'un choix d'axiomes et non d'un absolu fixé une fois pour toutes. Dans la géométrie (...) de Riemann, cette mesure des angles peut même varier d'un point à l'autre, selon la courbure de l'espace. Je crois que j'aimerais pouvoir être ce genre de 'spinoziste' là : qui conserve le système, mais ne croit plus à l'essence du triangle et à l'absolue nécessité de la géométrie". Un spinoziste riemannien, en somme. » Le but de ce petit livre est de jeter les bases d'un tel programme. Il veut reprendre l'ancien rêve d'une éthique more geometrico, telle que Spinoza en a lancé le projet en plein cœur de la « révolution scientifique » et reposer avec lui la seule question qui vaille au fond : qu'est-ce que « bien vivre »? De son modèle, il retient que ce « bien » ne doit pas être pensé comme une norme extérieure au désir des hommes, mais y prend au contraire sa source, de sorte que l'éthique est inséparable d'une théorie des affects et des désirs. Mais il veut le faire dans un cadre qui n'est plus celui d'une confiance absolue dans l'usage des formalismes, ni dans la capacité de l'homme à dévoiler les « lois de la nature » ou à détenir le secret des « lois de la pensée ». « Éthique locale » ne signifie d'abord que cette provocation à penser la possibilité d'une éthique rationnelle et systématique sans accepter le point de vue de surplomb, « global », que permettait la douce assurance d'un régime transparent du monde à la raison dont les deux premières parties de l'Éthique sont profondément empreintes. Pages de début Liste des abréviations utilisées Avant-propos Incipit : Descartes en son cabinet Chapitre Premier. « À la manière des géomètres »? Chapitre II. Construire, dit-il Conclusion : en quoi ce livre est-il un livre d'éthique?Pages de fin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 151-155 [Access article in PDF] Buddhism and Christianity: A Multicultural History of their Dialogue. By Whalen Lai and Michael von Bruck. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001. xiv + 265 pp. This book is an abridged translation of Buddhismus und Christentum: Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, first published in 1997 by Verlag C. H. Beck in Munich. I do not know how much has been lost in the abridgement, (...) but this English version remains a treasure trove that deserves to be read and digested by everyone engaged in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.From the English title, I expected a somewhat dry work of intellectual history, summarizing dated doctrinal debates. This book provides much more than that. Most valuable is its emphasis on the historical and cultural context of Buddhist-Christian encounters, especially the poisonous legacy of Western colonialism (which still survives today as economic neocolonialism). These quite varied contexts have usually been decisive for the success or failure of the encounter, and as this nuanced but frank study shows, the failures have been at least as notable as the successes. Here, too, we must remember the past if we want to do more than keep repeating it. As well as identifying specific problems, there is a perceptive analysis of the obstacles to openness and dialogue in each case.The penultimate chapter includes a discussion of our Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, its conferences, and this journal. As a relative newcomer to the conversations, I found this particular example of contextualizing fascinating. In just the few conferences I have been able to attend, there have been so many facets to the dialogue that it has been difficult to gain a sense of the whole, to understand how the main threads have developed and interwoven. How well do we remember what has already been discussed, and often agreed upon? It is important that we do not just keep repeating ourselves, and I know of no other book that conveys the historical dimension of the dialogue so well. The silent, contemplative aspects of the encounter are also addressed: cross-cultural meditation groups, Christian Zen teachers, and visits to each other's monastic centers.A useful foreword by Hans Kung reviews his own contributions, including his [End Page 151] paradigm analysis of six different "general constellations" found in the Christian tradition (the original Jewish-apocalyptic paradigm, the ancient ecumenical-Hellenistic paradigm, the medieval Roman Catholic paradigm, the Reformation Protestant-evangelical paradigm, the modernist progress-oriented paradigm, and now the postmodern ecumenical paradigm) and six other constellations in the Buddhist tradition (Gautama's original paradigm, the Theravada- sravakayana paradigm, the Mahayana paradigm, the tantric Vajrayana paradigm, a defensive modernist paradigm, and most recently an emerging postmodernist paradigm), with the implication that we need to be careful to clarify which of the paradigms we are comparing.Inevitably, the focus is limited: India and Sri Lanka are discussed at length, but not southeast Asia; China and Japan, but not Korea; Germany, but not the rest of Europe. The Indian chapter is mostly about Tibetans in exile. I was intrigued by the generation gap between older, conservative Tibetan monks and more freethinking younger ones. Otherwise, the Indian dialogue seems not to have been as intensive as many other places in Asia, which makes sense since there are relatively few Buddhists in India today. Given the mass conversions of Dalits, the social context has usually been the emancipation of disadvantaged social groups, and is further complicated now by the increasing influence of neo-Hindu political movements, which makes all interreligious exchange more sensitive.The Sri Lankan dialogue, perhaps more than any other, has been preoccupied with the heritage of colonialism. Sinhalese take pride in being citizens of the only country to have shaken off colonial rule with a successful Buddhist revolution, which reversed the power relationship between the two religions. Evidently most Sinhala Buddhists, including much of the sangha, accept the need to defend Buddhism and Buddhist culture militarily, if necessary. The ruling political class that succeeded the British, a largely Buddhist- and Marxist-inspired elite, opted for constructing a national identity... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 141-160 [Access article in PDF] The Politics of Character in John Milton's Divorce Tracts David Hawkes nunquam privatum esse sapientum --Cicero I. There has recently been a great deal of debate over the relative influence on Milton's politics of two discordant revolutionary ideologies: classical republicanism and radical Protestant theology. 1 In the mid-seventeenth century the search for intellectual precedents and (...) rationalizations of the English revolution brought these two traditions into an uneasy alliance, and Milton, like many other revolutionary apologists, drew on both of them. Of course the two schools of thought are not necessarily incompatible. J. G. A. Pocock notes one point of connection between them: The context in which men attain their final end--or recover their prima forma, though this concept might not have been antinomian enough for the radical saints of the New Model--is that of apocalypse; the "end" of Aristotelian teleology is still united with the eschatological "end" of prophetic time. 2The Aristotelian "end" of man is the good, defined as "an activity of soul in accordance with virtue," and the belief that one can or has fulfilled that end is [End Page 141] certainly amenable to Protestant antinomianism. 3 Furthermore, as Sharon Achinstein points out, Milton's "conception of virtue... melds the religious notion of conscience with a classical sense of civic duty." 4 On the other hand there are significant differences between the classical and the Christian notions of "virtue" and the "good," which dictate that, as Nigel Smith puts it, "[c]lassical republicanism, properly conceived, would in many ways be in conflict with the millenarian, chiliastic and perfectionist Protestantism of the sects." 5 The problem faced by Milton as a Protestant Republican is that the definition of the "good" offered by millennial sanctification and that attainable through Aristotelian virtue are in many ways mutually exclusive and contradictory. They have been characterized as such ever since Augustine's City of God asserted that pagan ethics are incompatible with true, Christian virtue. 6 Millennialism relies on faith; civic humanist virtue relies on works. Antinomianism abolishes the law; republicanism institutes the rule of law. The saints are sanctified by grace; the virtuous are distinguished by their own strength of character. Radical Protestant freedom is negative and private--it is the ability to speak and worship according to the dictates of conscience; civic humanist liberty is positive and public, the ability to participate fully in the government of the res publica. While daunting, however, these contradictions are not quite insuperable. I believe that Milton finds a common denominator in the accounts given by these two traditions of psychological objectification and that the agreement of Roman and Christian morality on this point leads him to make the tendency to objectification (or rather the ability to resist that tendency) the central issue of his mature political theory.The political ideas of the classical republicans and their descendants, the Renaissance civic humanists, were based upon Aristotle's Politics and Nico-machean Ethics, while the intellectual sources of radical Protestantism can be traced to Luther's commentaries on Paul's epistles. During the English revolution the Pauline exegesis of the relationship between the old and the new covenants provided intellectual ammunition against custom and tradition, as well as inspiring the antinomianism of the radical fringe to which Milton was falsely accused of adhering during the divorce controversy. In the divorce tracts Milton points out that Aristotle and Paul share one fundamental tenet: they argue that interior and exterior slavery are of the same nature and therefore concomitant [End Page 142] and inseparable. Furthermore, Milton notes, Aristotle and Paul both claim that exterior and interior slavery consist in "carnality," the subjection of the spirit to the flesh. This identification of carnality with servility becomes a constant strain which runs throughout Milton's career and provides the consistent element in his apparently vacillating theories of politics and religion.II. Although this argument recurs throughout Milton's career, it is first hammered into shape during the divorce controversy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics in Light of ChildhoodDavid Cloutier (bio)Review of Ethics in Light of Childhood John Wall Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010. 204 pp. $34.95.John Wall’s ambitious volume contends that “considerations of childhood should not only have greater importance but fundamentally transform how morality is understood” (1). He rightly suggests that “the story of childhood cannot be told in one-dimensional formulas of either innocence and vulnerability or unruliness and (...) undevelopment” (7), but instead require a new paradigm for ethics: “childism.” He questions three historical views of childhood: the “top-down,” the “bottom-up,” and the developmentalist. Wall splendidly moves beyond these views and demonstrates that considering children should instruct us in the limitations of ordinary approaches to ethics—not only for children’s sake but for adults too.How so? Wall’s constructive section considers ontology, teleology, and de-ontology. In them, relying heavily on twentieth-century continental philosophy, supplemented by some social-scientific literature and numerous anecdotal examples, he develops an overall approach to the moral life. First, he argues for an ontology of “restless and endless play” (36) reflective of the human capacity for creativity possessed by both children and adults. Secondly, the moral life has a teleology of “narrative expansion,” with a constant movement toward a “more richly diverse life story” (60). Finally, moral obligation involves a constant “decentering” of the self in which “the world I create for myself should be disrupted and stretched out as far as possible by genuine human difference” (88). Building on the insights of top-down and bottom-up traditions, and going beyond the “flatly unilinear assumptions” of developmental “stageism” (81) ethics involves a constant circularity, exemplified in the final three chapters on specific issues. For example, families who “create increasingly expansive family worlds” engage in top-down transmission of tradition, developmental formation of relationality, and bottom-up nurturing of otherness (149). These qualities apply not only to children but to parents as well, and thus satisfy Wall’s desire for an ethics that is fully “child-inclusive” and that does not privilege adult agents. He succeeds admirably at demonstrating that the real agency children actually possess and exercise, as well as their vulnerability and passivity, are not simply incomplete versions of what adults possess fully.I would raise two concerns. First, the book works so hard to avoid any kind of linearity that criteria enabling judgment seem lacking—for example, surely some [End Page 195] forms of “disruption” are not to be welcomed (especially by children). The telos of “narrative expansion” so strongly refuses to privilege any perspective that it threatens to empty out what one might gingerly call “adult commitments”—to stable love, production, civic life, and fine arts—all of which require virtue (absent here), and which seem necessary for children to flourish. Aspiring “to go on creating oneself endlessly” (58) can be a fruitful depiction of adult life, or it can be an immature escapism. Without a thicker telos, the distinction is difficult to make.Second, his category of “childism” (3) forces him to artificially avoid any telos of maturation. In parallel with other “isms” (e.g., feminism), he argues that children are “full human beings,” live in “fully meaningful moral worlds,” and are “full participants in... human moral experience” (29). “Full” appears throughout, but the inclusion parallel clashes with maturation in human life. True, children and adults have both agency and vulnerability (39), but children, generally speaking, are more vulnerable and are less capable agents, and thus will have particular needs (and also offer particular gifts to adults). “Childism” sometimes obscures the particularities of childhood, and how we are bodily and culturally directed toward some “maturity.” Yet these concerns should not diminish Wall’s achievement in displaying how childhood can teach adults much about ethics.David CloutierMount St. Mary’s UniversityDavid Cloutier David Cloutier is an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s University. He received his BA from Carleton College and his PhD from Duke University. He is the author of Love, Reason, and God’s Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics (Anselm/St. Mary’s Press, 2008) and editor of Leaving... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 224-225 [Access article in PDF] Ross Harrison. Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth-Century Political Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. v + 281. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.00. The title of Ross Harrison's book is taken from Macduff's line in Macbeth, "[c]onfusion now have made his masterpiece," in reference to the discovery of a murdered king. Regicide (...) was a particularly unsettling crime in the day of Shakespeare, as Harrison reminds us, since kings were often associated with divinity (2). And perhaps it was their obvious and fragile mortality, as witnessed by the killing of King Charles I, that served to further unsettle what had previously been taken for granted in the modern world—the very foundations of the state. Today, Jürgen Habermas informs us from the perspective of critical theory that we live in a "postmetaphysical condition," where we can no longer count on the apparatus of Christian natural law or Platonic Ideas to justify the state and its laws. Practically, the difficulty in Iraq of bringing together the various religious perspectives of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians, and others suggests that different religions or even varying interpretations of the same religion provide formidable barriers to the foundation of political systems. How do we bring people of different worldviews and perspectives together into one state? The great virtue of Harrison's book is the reminder that this is not a new problem. Rather, it resides at the core of the greatest challenges for political philosophy in any age. This challenge inspires what Harrison calls "some of the greatest and most important political philosophy ever written" (1).Thomas Hobbes is the first to receive extensive attention. Harrison provides a careful step-by-step analysis of Hobbes's reasoning in Leviathan. His affection for Hobbes is thinly veiled, as he parenthetically refers to Leviathan as "the greatest work of the greatest political philosopher" (62). Much of his account is standard, as he skillfully walks the reader from Hobbes's fascination with science to the sweeping authority of the sovereign. What is particularly worthy of note is his attention to the matter of foundations in Hobbes. Here his characterization reminds us of the eternality of Hobbes's central problem: "... how in a sceptical age to make statements of human reason that can depend on something fixed, or generally agreed" (64). Having found God superfluous to the question, according to Harrison, Hobbes ultimately employs prudence in relation to self-interest to be this fixed object. Since prudence—particularly its response to threats of violence—is the one element shared by all peoples, regardless of their religious or moral commitments, it makes the most sturdy foundation of political reasoning.The second object of extended attention is John Locke. And as was the case with his treatment of Hobbes, Harrison again looks to the foundations. As most readers of Locke are aware, the law of nature plays a central role in his thought, and if one is to get to the foundations of his politics, then one must unravel its mysteries. Locke makes solving these mysteries difficult for readers by denying the existence of innate ideas in the Essay. Locke makes his own task of grounding his theory difficult by doing just the same—denying the existence of innate ideas. Grounding natural law is made even more troublesome by his apparent appeals to these very same innate ideas on two occasions in the Second Treatise (§11, §136). It is perhaps in his own confusion that, according to Harrison, he "falls back, [End Page 224] after all, on revelation" (180). This is particularly unsatisfactory for Harrison, since revelation is characterized by the indeterminacy that led to the political conflict between Protestants and Catholics in modern England and eventually to the works of Hobbes and Locke in the first place.Shorter chapters are devoted to Grotius, Pufendorf, and the less-celebrated sixteenth-century figure, John Ponet. Ponet is found to appeal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Method in Ancient PhilosophyDavid K. GliddenJyl Gentzler, editor. Method in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 398. Cloth, $72.00.The fifteen papers in this collection constitute revisions of conference proceedings and reflect the varied interests of participants. The ensemble exhibits a thoroughly modern methodology. Whatever and however various ancient methods of philosophy may have been, in Anglo-American scholarship it is standard practice to first address established (...) scholarly interpretations as the primary entry point to critical discussionóoften displacing antiquity with a critical vocabulary of philosophical modernity. Scholars may come to understand each other better, but at the risk of asking the wrong questions or sacrificing ancient texts themselves as mere means of producing papers.Most scholars are progressives. They believe philosophy has advanced past the comparatively primitive wisdom of antiquity, and so such scholars feel perfectly entitled to make better sense of ancient texts, by patiently explaining what the ancients would have meant had they only been able to get it right. There are, of course, exceptions. And some papers in this collection suggest deeper faith in our philosophic fathers. So, the battle between the ancients and the moderns is joined once more, between those who would adorn their papers with footnotes for their peers and those who would attempt more anthropological an inquiry into ancient philosophic practices.Ian Mueller and Robert Bolton each address the same passage in Plato's Phaedo, both beginning with an article from Vlastos, first published in 1969. Mueller thoughtfully explores three different yet related accounts of what we might call scientific method in explaining Plato's views on natural change. Bolton wonders whether scholars are asking the wrong questions. Patricia Curd attempts a progressivist account of Eleatic thought, notwithstanding her recognition of the paucity of ancient sources. Complete with elaborately numbered sentences, Gail Fine focuses primarily on Burnyeat (1976) on Plato on Protagoras. Constance Meinwald presents a rather near-sighted account of two passages in the Philebus that employ the peras-apeiron distinction, with a view toward Plato's allegedly modernist mathematization of understanding. Lesley Brown revisits five pages of the Sophist that were hotly debated in the 1960s. With charity and elegance, she offers several plausible solutions to puzzles posed by previous scholars. Sometimes time smoothes over differences.A. A. Long's essay on Plato's presentation of Socrates in the Theaetetus might appear more philosophically anthropological. Yet Long reveals progressive sympathies, suggesting that Plato dispatches Socrates in the Theaetetus, so as to prepare the way for a more rigorously academic form of philosophizing, such as that exhibited in the Sophist. [End Page 111] In this way, Long speculates, Plato abandoned practical ethics for the academic life of research, so familiar to university professors and conference participants. It might be hard to square such speculation with Plato's Laws and the reception of Plato's writings among his own contemporaries. Still, Socrates' shifting role in Plato's dialogues is well worth pondering.By comparison, T. H. Irwin's contribution is wonderfully old-fashioned. His paper addresses the background knowledge to be presumed by ancient readers of Plato's dialogues and how that knowledge is artfully put to use in Plato's depiction of Socrates' reflections on the unity of virtue. By speculating on Plato's relation to his ancient readers, Irwin displaces many modernist preoccupations, though not without himself falling victim to that peculiar scholarly obsession of dating Plato's dialogues by their doctrines.With characteristic conservatism, Gisela Striker cautions scholars not to over-read Aristotle's Prior Analytics. While that extraordinary work may have deep implications for the history of formal logic, it probably was instead intended to be part of a general account of argument. In a similar vein, Charlotte Witt attempts to rescue Aristotle from scholars who would delimit Aristotle's multifarious uses of the "for the sake of" explanation, which altogether pervade his metaphysics, physics, biology and ethics. Yet, Witt soon finds herself competing in a contest over interpretive distinctions, a sport that will certainly never capture Aristotle's own authorial intentions.Facing another mass of scholarship, in this case on Aristotle's dialectic, C. D. C. Reeve sensibly attempts to... (shrink)

The single most important source for Second Temple Jewish exegetical traditions is the three commentaries series written by Philo of Alexandria. Wanting to understand Second Temple Judaism more fully, a group of scholars founded the Philo Institute in 1971 to explore those traditions. The following year they began publication of The Studia Philonica as a venue for their research; however, the significance of Philo's work soon captured the interest of a broader group of scholars and quickly opened the journal's pages (...) up to all aspects of Philonic studies. Six issues were released from 1972-1980 containing twenty-five articles, annual bibliographies, and abstracts of notable publications. The list of contributors is a who's who in Philonic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. After a lapse of almost a decade, the journal was revived as the Studia Philonica Annual, which is devoted to furthering the study of Hellenistic Judaism, in particular the writings and thought of the Hellenistic-Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 b.c.e. to ca. 50 c.e.). Each year the Annual publishes the most current Philonic scholarship along with an extensive bibliography that is maintained by David Runia. (shrink)

The target article skillfully evaluates data on mental disorders in relation to predictions from evolutionary genetic theories of neutral evolution, balancing selection, and polygenic mutation-selection balance, resulting in a negative outlook for the likelihood of success finding genes for mental disorders. Nevertheless, new conceptualizations, methods, and continued interactions across disciplines provide hope.

Henry Bugbee was an American philosopher whose name is probably less familiar than other twentieth-century thinkers, yet his small volume of writings is deeply appreciated by those who have read him. A fondness for the man and his thought shines through the pages of this new collection edited by David Rodick, who hopes to introduce Bugbee to a new generation and to make him "more accessible to the wider public". This is a worthy goal, given the delightful idiosyncrasy of (...) Bugbee's writing.The introduction includes a short biographical sketch, attributing the denial of tenure at Harvard to Bugbee's preference for "experiential reflection" over formal writing; this "fateful event" led to the production... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Was Isaac Newton an Arian?Thomas C. PfizenmaierHistorians of Newton's thought have been wide ranging in their assessment of his conception of the trinity. David Brewster, in his The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), was fully convinced that Newton was an orthodox trinitarian, although he recognized that "a traditionary belief has long prevailed that Newton was an Arian."1 Two reasons were used to defend his conclusion that Newton (...) was orthodox. The first was a letter from John Craig, a friend of Newton, written shortly after Newton's death to John Conduitt, the husband of Newton's niece. In this letter Craig remarked that Newton's theological opinions "were sometimes different from those which are commonly received" but that he hoped Conduitt would publish Newton's theological papers, "that the world may see that Sir Isaac Newton was as good a Christian as he was a mathematician and philosopher."2 The second reason with which Brewster defended his conclusion was his acknowledgment that the doctrine of the trinity itself had variations.I had no hesitation when writing the Life of Sir Isaac Newton in 1830, in coming to the conclusion that he was a believer in the Trinity; and in giving this opinion on the creed of so great a man, and so indefatigable a student of scripture, I was well aware that there are various forms of Trinitarian truth, and various modes of expressing it, which have been received as orthodox in the purest societies of the Christian Church.3L. T. More in his biography Isaac Newton gently chided Brewster for not publishing some of the crucial manuscripts, which eventually became [End Page 57] part of the Keynes collection.4 From these additional manuscripts More reached the conclusion that Newton was not orthodox but an Arian. He proceeded to say that Newton was not only an Arian but, because of the manner in which he understood Jesus' role as prophet, a Unitarian.5More recently the famous British economist John M. Keynes, who considered it a great "impiety" that the Portsmouth family's collection of Newton's non-scientific manuscripts were dispersed at the Sotheby's auction in 1936 and who recovered about half of them creating the "Keynes" collection at Cambridge, provided yet a third interpretation of Newton's thought.Very early in life Newton abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity. At this time the Socinians were an important Arian sect amongst intellectual circles. It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or skeptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority. He was persuaded that the revealed documents give no support to the Trinitarian doctrines which were due to late falsifications. The revealed God was one God.6Among contemporary scholars, the consensus is that Newton was an Arian rather than a Socinian.7 This view is clearly expressed by Richard [End Page 58] Westfall who writes, "Well before 1675, Newton had become an Arian in the original sense of the term. He recognized Christ as a divine mediator between God and man, who was subordinate to the Father who created him."8 Yet Frank Manuel, in his The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974), advises that we not try to push Newton into a theological categorization too quickly. He reminds us that Newton was, if nothing else, an original thinker.It is an error to seize upon his antitrinitrianism in order to pigeonhole him in one of the recognized categories of heresy—Arian, Socinian, Unitarian, or Deist.9So how did Isaac Newton conceive of the trinity? In exploring his writing on the subject we will be guided by two principles mentioned above. The first is Brewster's insight that the trinitarian doctrine has in fact been understood with a certain degree of variety within the sphere of orthodoxy. The second is from Manuel's reminder, that we must resist the temptation to make Newton "fit" some predetermined category or school of trinitarian thought. We will begin by looking at the resources available for studying... (shrink)

Plagiarism has been a long standing concern within higher education. Yet with the rapid rise in the use and availability of the Internet, both the research literature and media have raised the notion that the online environment is accelerating the decline in academic ethics. The majority of research that has been conducted to investigate such claims have involved self-report data from students. This study sought to collect empirical data to investigate the potential influence the prevalence of the Internet has had (...) on significant higher education artifacts by comparing dissertations written prior to widespread use of the Internet with those written in a period in ubiquitous Internet use. Due to the prestige associated with the doctoral degree and the fact that the majority of the effort necessary to achieve such a degree resides within the dissertation, this study utilized Doctor of Philosophy dissertations written in English and published by accredited universities in the U.S. and Canada. A sample of 384 dissertations were analyzed by Turnitin plagiarism detection software. The mean similarity indices for pre-Internet and post-Internet eras were 14.5 and 12.3 %, respectively. A Mann Whitney U test indicated that the differences between groups was significant, however opposite than has been purported within the exigent literature. When comparing the counts of dissertations for each time era considering those with plagiarism versus those that had little/no evidence thereof, there was no statistically significant difference. The findings of this study suggest that the Internet may not be significantly impacting the prevalence of plagiarism in advanced levels of higher education. (shrink)

I argue that thought experiments are a form of experimental reasoning similar to real experiments. They require the same ability to participate by following a narrative as real experiments do. Participation depends in turn on using what we already know to visualize, manipulate and understand what is unfamiliar or problematic. I defend the claim that visualization requires embodiment by an example which shows how tacit understanding of the properties of represented objects and relations enables us to work out how such (...) objects might behave in a postulated world. This knowledge is that of embodied agents. That thought experiments require embodied participation is what makes them experiments rather than arguments. Unlike real experiments, from which ordinary perception has been displaced by instrumentation, thought experiments still appeal to relatively unmediated common sense, even when their purpose is to criticize or subvert common sense notions. (shrink)

Examining the images of war displayed on front pages of the New York Times, David Shields makes the case that they ultimately glamorize military conflict. He anchors his case with an excerpt on the delight of the sublime from Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theory in A Philosophical Enquiry. By contrast, this essay considers violence and warfare using not the Burkean sublime, but instead the beautiful in Burke’s aesthetics, and argues that forming identities on the beautiful in the Burkean sense can (...) ultimately shut down dialogue and feed the lust for violence and revenge. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text--the original expression of Taoist philosophy--and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In _Original Tao,_ Harold D. Roth exhumes the seminal text of Taoism--_Inward Training (...) (Nei-yeh)_--not from a tomb but from the pages of the _Kuan Tzu,_ a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. _Inward Training_ is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the _Tao-te Ching_; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that _Inward Training_ is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B.C. (the late Warring States period in China). These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the _Chuang Tzu_ and the world-renowned _Tao-te Ching._ With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early "philosophical" Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. _Original Tao_ contains an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what _Inward Training_ meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be "entombed" within the _Kuan Tzu,_ and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period. (shrink)

Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text -- the original expression of Taoist philosophy -- and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In _Original Tao,_ Harold D. Roth exhumes the seminal (...) text of Taoism -- _Inward Training _ -- not from a tomb but from the pages of the _Kuan Tzu,_ a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. _Inward Training_ is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the _Tao-te Ching_; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that _Inward Training_ is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B.C.. These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the _Chuang Tzu_ and the world-renowned _Tao-te Ching._ With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early "philosophical" Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. _Original Tao_ contains an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what _Inward Training_ meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be "entombed" within the _Kuan Tzu,_ and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period. (shrink)

The sciences use a wide range of visual devices, practices, and imaging technologies. This diversity points to an important repertoire of visual methods that scientists use to adapt representations to meet the varied demands that their work places on cognitive processes. This paper identifies key features of the use of visualization in a range of scientific domains and considers the implications of this repertoire for understanding scientists as cognitive agents.