This book discusses how Plato, one the fiercest legal critics in ancient Greece, became – in the longue durée – its most influential legislator. Making use of a vast scholarly literature, and offering original readings of a number of dialogues, it argues that the need for legal critique and the desire for legal permanence set the long arc of Plato’s corpus—from the Apology to the Laws. Modern philosophers and legal historians have tended to overlook the fact that Plato was the (...) most prolific legislator in ancient Greece. In the pages of his Republic and Laws, he drafted more than 700 statutes. This is more legal material than can be credited to the archetypal Greek legislators—Lycurgus, Draco, and Solon. The status of Plato’s laws is unique, since he composed them for purely hypothetical cities. And remarkably, he introduced this new genre by writing hard-hitting critiques of the Greek ideal of the sovereignty of law. Writing in the milieu in which immutable divine law vied for the first time with volatile democratic law, Plato rejected both sources of law, and sought to derive his laws from what he called ‘political technique’. At the core of this technique is the question of how the idea of justice relates to legal and institutional change. Filled with sharp observations and bold claims, Platonic Legislations shows that it is possible to see Plato—and our own legal culture—in a new light “In this provocative, intelligent, and elegant work D. L. Dusenbury has posed crucial questions not only as regards Plato’s thought in the making, but also as regards our contemporaneity.”—Giorgio Camassa, University of Udine “There is a tension in Greek law, and in Greek legal thinking, between an understanding of law as unchangeable and authoritative, and a recognition that formal rules are often insufficient for the interpretation of reality, and need to be constantly revised to match it. Dusenbury’s book illuminates the sophistication of Plato’s legal thought in its engagement with this tension, and explores the potential of Plato’s reflection for modern legal theory.”—Mirko Canevaro, The University of Edinburgh. (shrink)

John Locke is one of the most important figures in the history of political thought. His Second Treatise on Government was one of the most significant political statements of its time and provides the foundations of liberal political thought. His views on the social contract, political obligation, rebellion, revolution and property remain strikingly relevant today. Locke on Government introduces and assesses: * Locke's life and the background to the Second Treatise on Government *The text and ideas of the Second Treatise (...) *The continuing importance of Locke's work to philosophy For student's coming to Locke for the first time, Locke on Government will be an invaluable guide to his political thought. (shrink)

John Locke is one of the most important figures in the history of political thought. His _Second Treatise on Government_ was one of the most significant political statements of its time and provides the foundations of liberal political thought. His views on the social contract, political obligation, rebellion, revolution and property remain strikingly relevant today. _Locke on Government_ introduces and assesses: * Locke's life and the background to the _Second Treatise on Government_ *The text and ideas of the _Second Treatise_ (...) *The continuing importance of Locke's work to philosophy For student's coming to Locke for the first time, _Locke on Government_ will be an invaluable guide to his political thought. (shrink)

First, I establish on the basis of a few texts in the Timaeus the need for this type of semantic interpretation. These passages occur in three clearly identifiable contexts, each concerning how best to think and talk about various aspects of the universe. The first passage constitutes one of two premises in the argument concerning the relation between time and eternity; the second involves an analogy pertaining to the Receptacle; the third clarifies the language for spatial directions that can obtain (...) in a spherical universe. Having thus shown that this sense of the language is indeed present in this dialogue, there follows an extended application to and discussion of three passages in which this language is also prominent, the first of which has commanded significantly more scholarly commentary than have the other two: (1) the other premise as well as the conclusion of the argument about the relation between time and eternity, (2) the analogy between the four primary natural bodies and the letters of a language, and (3) for the second time, the number of worlds that exist. The paper concludes with an argument against Vlastos’ notorious claim that Plato here amounted to a scientific Luddite who set Greek science back by crushing fact with value; Plato is, on the contrary, merely indicating the epistemological dependence of the whole of empirical science upon metaphysics. (shrink)

Our passion for this work arose in very different histories of living, but these histories converged some years ago around the writings of Humberto Maturana1. There were other reasons for us getting together, but it was the ideas of Maturana which inspired us both to take another look at the way we were doing things in our research and education, respectively. One of us (Lloyd) was grappling with basic biological questions which arose from research on the physiology of stress. (...) Maturana's ideas provided a new way of thinking about the relationship between living things and their environment. David, in psychology and education, sought from Maturana a more solid scientific grounding for the extraordinary richness of the experiential learning environment in which he worked. (shrink)

The interplay of introduction and elimination rules for propositional connectives is often seen as suggesting a distinguished role for intuitionistic logic. We prove three formal results concerning intuitionistic propositional logic that bear on that perspective, and discuss their significance. First, for a range of connectives including both negation and the falsum, there are no classically or intuitionistically correct introduction rules. Second, irrespective of the choice of negation or the falsum as a primitive connective, classical and intuitionistic consequence satisfy exactly the (...) same structural, introduction, and elimination (briefly, elementary) rules. Third, for falsum as primitive only, intuitionistic consequence is the least consequence relation that satisfies all classically correct elementary rules. (shrink)

The Australian Aborigines' environmental culture and the "double bind" approach used in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous are considered as a source for the generation of a new strategy for dealing with the ecological problems of our day. The strategy aims at achieving a negotiated outcome in issues of high societal risk related to waste management in the Hawkesbury region of Sydney, Australia.

The diverse papers which make up this book are variations on a theme which is based in biological science - yet none of the contributors is really a biologist. Our metaphor for describing what we are doing here is that we have gathered together in a room because that particular room provides us with a certain view of our individual areas of interest - a view that may have been previously obscured. We are visiting the house of biology in the (...) hope that we may see more clearly things that we each find baffling about our particular field of work in education, research, or daily living. (shrink)

The question which is never entirely resolved is: what is life? Biology, claims to stand for the study of life and living things, yet we would say that it cannot make a thoroughly clear distinction between living and non living, except in some very obvious cases. There are textbook definitions, of course, based on certain notable properties such as the ability to metabolize or reproduce, but these are arbitrary. If we are familiar with the characteristics of a particular animal or (...) plant, we know enough to be able to pronounce that it is dead when certain internal and external behaviours are no longer evident. Even this has difficulties - such as revealed in the arguments about whether to switch off a human life support system or not. When you find a squishy object on the seashore, can you be sure if it is alive or dead - or never living? The same dilemma confronts medical scientists and microbiologists trying to decide, for example, whether viruses are living, or quasi living, or intermittently living, or what. (shrink)

Uncertainty about funding; difficulty in determining research priorities ; and concern about technology transfer (the lack of application of research results): these words stand out in the language of scientific/industrial research and development, today. So called technology transfer seems to be the central issue because the criteria for determining research priorities and funding decisions are mostly based on the expected "pay off", i.e. the economic benefits which will result from the research findings being put into use within the industry. This (...) applies, not only in situations where the industry is providing a proportion of the funding, as in most agricultural research, but to scientific research generally which is intended for the "public good.". (shrink)

I don't want your agreement! I think I would prefer your understanding. Your agreement would be useful in a workplace to achieve a task. But that is not a social system. We want to live together in mutual respect. Your agreement would take hold of me and threaten to devour my own being - just as my agreement would do to you. For we each bring forth our own world in our every present moment. No matter how convenient it may (...) seem to be, I cannot truly stand still - with you or anyone. (shrink)

My occupation is applied research and - funding arrangements being the force which drives such work - I am working with feedlot cattle at the moment. I have to find out whether they are unduly stressed and, if so, how to relieve it; also how much and what type of shade they require, and what are acceptable criteria of animal welfare. Like most research scientists, I also have a personal hobbyhorse which I can weave into my work. It is that (...) stress affects the competence of an animal's immune system in subtle ways that have to do with its cognition. Alas, the plot thickens! (shrink)

It has been claimed that decisions reached democratically have the consent of those subject to them. It will be shown that arguments for this view rest on either a Kantian or a utilitarian conception of consent. When the distinct nature of these arguments is kept clearly in mind, it becomes apparent that little remains of any of them. Nothing remains of the argument based on the Kantian conception, at least in so far as it is used to support the view (...) that democratic government rests on the consent of the governed. Though something remains of the arguments based on the utilitarian conception, what remains is not what they often are thought to establish. The spurious plausibility of consent arguments for democracy is due to switches between the Kantian conception of consent and the utilitarian. (shrink)

Under representation -- The aesthetic regime of representation -- The pathological sublime: pleasure and pain in the racial regime -- Race under representation -- Representation's coup -- The aesthetic taboo: aura, magic, and the primitive.

Within child and adolescent psychiatry, there are a number of potential dilemmas pertaining to diagnosis, treatment, the protection of the child, as well as the child's own developing intelligence and moral judgement. Diagnostic Dilemmas in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is the first in the IPPP series to explore this highly complex topic.

Ultradian rhythms are those that cycle many times in a day and are therefore measured in hours, minutes, seconds or even fractions of a second. In yeasts and protists, a temperature‐compensated clock with a period of about an hour (30–90 minutes) provides the time base upon which all central processes are synchronized. A 40‐minute clock in yeast times metabolic, respiratory and transcriptional processes, and controls cell division cycle progression. This system has at its core a redox cycle involving NAD(P)H and (...) dithiol–disulfide interconversions. It provides an archetype for biological time keeping on longer time scales (e.g. the daily cycles driven by circadian clocks) and underpins these rhythms, which cannot be understood in isolation. Ultradian rhythms are the foundation upon which the coherent functioning of the organism depends. BioEssays 29:465–473, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Algorithms for approximate Bayesian inference, such as those based on sampling (i.e., Monte Carlo methods), provide a natural source of models of how people may deal with uncertainty with limited cognitive resources. Here, we consider the idea that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) may be usefully modeled in terms of the number of samples, or “particles,” available to perform inference. To test this idea, we focus on two recent experiments that report positive associations between WMC and two distinct (...) aspects of categorization performance: the ability to learn novel categories, and the ability to switch between different categorization strategies (“knowledge restructuring”). In favor of the idea of modeling WMC as a number of particles, we show that a single model can reproduce both experimental results by varying the number of particles—increasing the number of particles leads to both faster category learning and improved strategy‐switching. Furthermore, when we fit the model to individual participants, we found a positive association between WMC and best‐fit number of particles for strategy switching. However, no association between WMC and best‐fit number of particles was found for category learning. These results are discussed in the context of the general challenge of disentangling the contributions of different potential sources of behavioral variability. (shrink)

It is in the formal procedures and their rigorous logic, not in any contingent eventuality in Beckett’s life or acts, humanly fascinating as they may be, that we must look for the political, ethical, and even aesthetic implications of his oeuvre. Politics is above all the domain of expression and of representation, undergirded alike by the notion of an integral voice that gives utterance (outerance) to an inward essence, whether conceived as interest or identity. Neither what he experienced nor what (...) he expresses gives us a way into the political and ethical implications of Beckett’s forms. Beckett takes the famous “formality” of bourgeois freedoms at their word, evacuating both freedom and duty of any content and reducing progress and development to the single, recurring word “on.” Likewise, the bodiless voice that imprints Beckett’s plays from Krapp on is not the guarantor of the fullness of the subject in its Mundigkeit, finding authentic expression of its inner essence in its utterance, but the manifestation of the lacuna inscribed by the “suffering of being” in the state-oriented formation of an ethical-political subject through aesthetic culture. The little syllable “on” that echoes though his work from Godot to Worstward Ho, which could be mistaken for a categorical imperative, nonetheless does not interpellate its auditor as ethical Subject; rather, it insists on bringing the subject face to face with its own thingliness, a thing for the thing that is this unowned voice buzzing in the ear. (shrink)

War After September 11 considers the just aims and legitimate limits of the United States' response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

This interactive independent teaching and learning tutorial can be used by individuals or small groups and takes a problem-based-learning approach to the complex legal and ethical issues raised by six scenarios. Based on real cases clearly demonstrating the problems arising from recent medical advancements, the cases cover reproductive technology, consent, genetic screening, participation in research trials, paternity and confidentiality. Additional features of the CD-ROM are a comprehensive glossary, cross-references to The Cambridge Medical Ethics Workbook and definitions from the Dictionary of (...) Medical Ethics. (shrink)

Scrutinizes views that elevate mankind, emphasize sincerity instead of truth, and question the simplicity of the gospel. Shows how the unchanging truth of God's Word must guide our thinking.

Functionalism offers an account of the relations that hold between behavioural functions, information and neural processing, and conscious experience from which one can draw two inferences: for any discriminable difference between qualia there must be an equivalent discriminable difference in function; and for any discriminable functional difference within a behavioural domain associated with qualia, there must be a discriminable difference between qualia. The phenomenon of coloured hearing synaesthesia appears to contradict the second of these inferences. We report data showing that (...) this form of synaesthesia is genuine and probably results from an aberrant projection from cortical language areas to a region specialized for the perception of colour. Since functionalism purports to be a general account of consciousness, one such negative instance, if it can be further sustained empirically, is sufficient to invalidate it. (shrink)

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.