Although the advantages of flight at high altitude were early recognized, so also were the physiological problems standing in the way of its realization. The idea of surmounting such problems by means of a pressurized cabin was advocated as early as 1909, while the first attempt to translate the concept into actuality occurred in 1921. Neither it nor several successive attempts enjoyed any real success until a project launched by the U. S. Air Corps in 1935 produced a breakthrough aircraft (...) designated the XC-35. The major reason for the favorable termination of that venture was the thoroughness of the engineering involved. But it is equally notable that this was the first instance in the age of powered flight where there was an active collaboration between the scientists and engineers, a rather curious circumstance in view of the fact that the achievement of altitude record-setting balloon flights in the nineteenth century had owed a great deal to an interconnection of aeronauts and scientists' laboratories. This paper focuses on the physiological investigations which informed the XC-35 engineers while at the same time bringing into being a new aeromedical laboratory taking the first small step toward turning aeromedicine into space medicine. (shrink)

This research provides a history of women's domestic duties in the care of the dead prior to its transformation into a male-dominated market activity. The author presents data on the position of importance women held in the premarket care of the dead as well as on the knowledge necessary to prepare the body for burial. Both the positions and the knowledge women held were later appropriated into the more “advanced” practices by the newly developing funeral industry in the mid-19th century; (...) moreover, the position women held as “shrouding women” was largely unacknowledged by the emerging funeral industry. (shrink)

Addresses the ways that writers, musicians, philosophers, politicians, critics, and scholars speak of music from varying standpoints and in varying ways.

Graphical AbstractScientists should learn to communicate effectively with their colleagues through long-term, sustained training instead of ad hoc, one-off “interventions” that may or may not occur during graduate school or postdoctoral work. Since such training may place unreasonable demands on research advisors, institutions should create career opportunities for “peer-peer communication teachers.”.

Adding to A.O. Aldridge’s 1951 list, this list of British eighteenth-century references to Shaftesbury provides further evidence that the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is an important rival to Lockean empiricism during the early and middle decades of the century. The peak of Shaftesbury’s influence occurs during the 1740’s and 1750’s when the deist controversy was at its height. A more conservative political and religious climate of opinion after 1759 is one reason for the decline of Shaftesbury’s reputation as a (...) philosopher. Another is Shaftesbury’s displacement by Hume as an important enemy of orthodox Christianity. During the 1760’s and later, Hume is attacked by the Scottish “common sense” philosophers, who find anticipations of Humean scepticism in Locke and Berkeley (but not in Shaftesbury), thereby unwittingly helping to provide the foundation for the eventual establishment of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as the “big three” of eighteenth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Adding to A.O. Aldridge’s 1951 list, this list of British eighteenth-century references to Shaftesbury provides further evidence that the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is an important rival to Lockean empiricism during the early and middle decades of the century. The peak of Shaftesbury’s influence occurs during the 1740’s and 1750’s when the deist controversy was at its height. A more conservative political and religious climate of opinion after 1759 is one reason for the decline of Shaftesbury’s reputation as a (...) philosopher. Another is Shaftesbury’s displacement by Hume as an important enemy of orthodox Christianity. During the 1760’s and later, Hume is attacked by the Scottish “common sense” philosophers, who find anticipations of Humean scepticism in Locke and Berkeley (but not in Shaftesbury), thereby unwittingly helping to provide the foundation for the eventual establishment of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as the “big three” of eighteenth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Adding to A.O. Aldridge’s 1951 list, this list of British eighteenth-century references to Shaftesbury provides further evidence that the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is an important rival to Lockean empiricism during the early and middle decades of the century. The peak of Shaftesbury’s influence occurs during the 1740’s and 1750’s when the deist controversy was at its height. A more conservative political and religious climate of opinion after 1759 is one reason for the decline of Shaftesbury’s reputation as a (...) philosopher. Another is Shaftesbury’s displacement by Hume as an important enemy of orthodox Christianity. During the 1760’s and later, Hume is attacked by the Scottish “common sense” philosophers, who find anticipations of Humean scepticism in Locke and Berkeley (but not in Shaftesbury), thereby unwittingly helping to provide the foundation for the eventual establishment of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as the “big three” of eighteenth-century philosophy. (shrink)

So obviously and blatantly real is the world around us—our own bodies and all things within reach of our senses—that from time immemorable man has tended to give it exclusive status—to feel that things in and related by space are the only realities. Such a belief is adequate for all practical affairs, but philosophers have always recognized that something is lacking in it. The very statement of the existence and reality of the external world brings in a second element: the (...) mind that recognizes and admits it; the agent that by its own consciousness establishes the contrast of internal and external. This mind—the group of all our interrelated mental faculties, conceptions, and perceptions, and our consciousness of them—is definitely not something external, not something in space that can be handled physically, and studied in its mechanical and geometrical relationships. It is completely invisible, intangible, and inaudible, and obviously we neither taste nor smell it. It forms no part of the external world, and yet the very fact that we are conscious of the world is a tacit recognition of the mind that perceives it. An inevitable dualism seems to result between the internal mind and the external world it perceives, between the subjective and the objective. (shrink)

No student of Hegel would deny that the meaning of Christ as a religious symbol concerned the Master as a philosopher. In fact the division of Hegelians into a “right,” “center” and “left” was first made by David Friedrich Strauss in terms of the different positions taken about what Hegel’s philosophy implied concerning the historical referent of the Christ symbol. James Yerkes not only attempts to resolve this same issue which proved so fateful to the early Hegelians, but he also (...) sets out to demonstrate what many of them contended, that is, that Hegel’s entire philosophical system can be properly interpreted only in light of his religious convictions about Christ. Yerkes claims that a Christian theological question about “the universal religious significance of the historic Christ event” is at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy, and, furthermore, that Hegel intended his speculative re-enactment of the Begriff of Christianity in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion to provide theologians with a language capable of conveying that universal significance. (shrink)

In the ultimate analysis, all philosophical differences are verbal. If by some intellectual X-Ray we could see into the minds of others, and perceive the exact nature of their concepts, we should be force to concede the correctness of their conclusions. The only alternative is that the mental processes—the laws of thought—differ from individual to individual.

To one not philosophically inclined, idealism seems a rather fantastic doctrine—one quite obviously false. The great Dr. Johnson thought he could adequately refute it by kicking his toe against a stone. In one form or another, however, it has existed wherever men have thought deeply on the fundamental nature of mind and of the external world. One cannot go far in a study of the sources of knowledge without becoming aware that the only immediate evidence of external objects lies in (...) our sense impressions. The mind has no way of putting itself in contact with things external to itself except through the five senses. Up to this point there is fairly general unanimity. The difficulty lies in correctly interpreting this fact. (shrink)

There are styles in thinking just as there are in dress. Their justification is often as slight, and once a style in thought has been established, it is followed with the same unconscious readiness. The possibility of styles lies, of course, in a lack of fixed criterions. In dress, the choice to a large extent is a matter of taste, and because taste varies from individual to individual and from time to time, styles also change. Although the foundations of science (...) are far more stable than those of taste, they yet have some touch of uncertainty. We live in a relative world, not an absolute one, and thus there is always room for the point of view to shift. We like to feel that we ourselves and the world in general are growing wiser, and thus that while there were errors in the thinking of the past, they are now being rapidly eliminated. The discovery that some philosopher of several thousand years ago held almost our identical views is always disconcerting. (shrink)