We review publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of shedding light on problems with strong connections to philosophy of science, of physics in particular. We show that core issues of philosophy of science, related, notably, to the nature of scientific theories; the nature of unification; and of causation loom large in scientific deep learning. Therefore, advances in deep learning could, and ideally should, have impact on philosophy of science, and vice versa. We suggest lines of (...) further research, and highlight the role ‘theory-based’ AI could have in future developments of the field. (shrink)

Locke's definition of miracles in “A Discourse of Miracles” is widely cited by scholars as evidence of his subjectivism on the matter. According to this interpretation, Locke held it to be sufficient that an event seems to be a violation of the laws of nature for it to count as a miracle. Nothing supernatural need actually occur. The principal aim of this article is to argue that Locke can and ought to be read as an objectivist about miracles. A subjectivist (...) reading falls short in two crucial respects: It undermines the function of miracles as evidence for divine revelation, so central to his account, and is at odds with his consistent and explicitly objective use of the term, as an event that necessarily involves a violation of the laws of nature. Indeed, it is from their objective nature that Locke thinks miracles derive their evidential force. A key part of my argument lies in distinguishing between ontological and epistemological issues concerning miracles and demonstrating how this distinction is present throughout his work on the matter. Ultimately, I conclude that what is often interpreted as Locke's subjectivism about miracles is his privileging of these epistemic issues. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Benjamin ButtonHenry Alexander (bio)IBenjamin Button was born at the age of seventy and as the years accumulated, grew younger physically. There are in his life three separate lines or threads. His chronological age begins in September of 1860 and terminated seventy years later. His "bodily age" consists of those stages of physical changes and of the different ways that he looked to others and to himself. (...) In 1860, he was an old man; his hair was sparse, scraggly, and nearly white; he had "a long smoke-colored beard"; his eyes were faded, watery, and tired; his teeth were ancient; his skin wrinkled, his voice had a cracked quaver and he had an aged stoop, even though he was five feet eight inches tall. From that time on, he gradually and steadily lost these characteristics of old age and became younger looking both to others and to himself until that time in 1930 when, an infant in his white crib, everything "faded out altogether from his mind." Finally, the third thread in Button's life consists of various psychological stages, attitudes, and feelings: his querulousness, his compliancy, his inquisitiveness, his assertiveness, his love for his wife, his business ability, his generosity, his enthusiasm for pleasure, his discontent with home life, his love of military activity and excitement, his delight in the company [End Page 1] of young women, the pleasure he took in his youthful appearance, his ambition to succeed at Harvard, the humiliations he suffered, his childish cheerfulness. These three threads in Benjamin Button's life—his chronological age, his bodily age, and his psychological age are seldom congruent and frequently unharmoniously interwoven.There are times when in ordinary life we may distinguish one or another of these threads out of a person's life. We may on occasion comment that someone looks so much older than she is where physical hardship, unusual sickness, or emotional pressures have left their scars. We may remark that another is so very young for her age, where, for example, inexperience, callousness, naivete show themselves in a person whose age would not lead us to expect such traits. We may remark upon how well one has kept oneself in shape when one's physique, muscle tone, and endurance are those of a decidedly younger person. Sometimes, certain traits of character—crabbiness, bossiness, old womanishness, crankiness, arbitrariness—associated with the elderly, may unexpectedly emerge in young people. Sometimes, traits perhaps conventionally associated with youth may crop up at a later stage of life, for example, carelessness, daredeviltry, sensuality, self-absorption, etc. The theme comes out in cases where we are surprised or shocked by the discrepancies between age and appearance or by changes in appearance or by psychological shifts which strike one as dissonant with one's own or another's age. There must be numerous variations on such discrepancies and they crop up from time to time in the ordinary course of things.But Benjamin Button's life was not ordinary. Those three threads of a person's life which may on occasion be singled out or contrasted are in his case systematically independent of one another. His years bear little relation to his physical age. His psychological states reflect little, if anything, of his years. Except for his middle years (between thirty-five and forty, say), there was little congruence between his chronological age, on the one hand, and his physical appearance or his psychological life, on the other.This dissonance between physical and chronological age has its ironical twists. For instance, when Benjamin was about twenty (in years), he met Hildegarde Moncrief (to whom he was later married). During their first meeting, she mistook him for his father's brother and she told Benjamin that fifty is "the mellow age" and that she "loves fifty." Of course, he appears to be a man of fifty, but he has forgotten how he appears [End Page 2] to others. He even "longed passionately to be fifty" (p. 73).1 The irony is that to Hildegarde and to everyone else, he was fifty.One anomaly that runs through much of Benjamin Button's life is his unawareness as to how... (shrink)

In Parts I, II, and III of the paper, the authors show that an argument essential to Alan White's defense of the Correspondence Theory of truth is unsuccessful. They argue that some of the premises of White's argument are false, and others incoherent. They show, further, that certain widely accepted assumptions in the philosophy of language, which underlie White's argument, must also be abandoned. In Part IV, they attempt to say something new about 'true', 'false', truth and falsity, and related (...) notions. They do not offer a competing theory to White's, but instead stress features of the use of these words and concepts which philosophers have either ignored or insufficiently emphasized. (shrink)

Henry S. Richardson is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. From 2008-18, he was the editor of Ethics. His previous books include Practical Reasoning about Final Ends, Democratic Autonomy, and Moral Entanglements. He has held fellowships sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry (...) David Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

The complexities of Henry More's eclectic Neoplatonism and his recklessly energetic poetic style have hitherto deterred scholars from undertaking a complete study of his long philosophical poem, A Platonick Song of the Soul . The aim of my dissertation is to study the Platonick Song in its entirety. I attempt to unravel the different strands of thought that it is woven of and reveal the consistency of thought and architectonic scheme of the work. ;The major themes of the Platonick (...) Song are the immateriality of the soul, its immortality, and its unfailing consciousness. I begin my study with an appraisal of More's work as an answer to Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, which had proclaimed the corporeality and mortality of the soul. The first poem of the Platonick Soul, "Psychozoia" is studied as an allegorical prelude to the work, and the Plotinian and Chaldean origins of More's systems are examined. The five poems after "Psychozoia" are divided into three sections dealing with the immortality of the soul , the macrocosmic manifestation of the soul and the alert soul "Antipsychophannychia," "The Praeexistency of the Soul" and "Antimonopsychia"). In the course of these three chapters, I have occasion to demonstrate More's reliance on the arguments of Ficino and Galileo. In the final chapter of my study, I reveal the importance of the Platonick Song for an understanding of the metaphysics, psychology and ethics of More's mature philosophy. In addition, I analyze the ways in which More's concepts of spirit, matter, space and the Deity resembled and differed from those of his Cambridge friend, Isaac Newton. (shrink)

Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most influential mythmaker. As a newspaper editor in South Africa, he chronicled his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to ennobling historical precedents. Most enduring of these were Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. The genealogy Gandhi invented in these years has become a cornerstone of contemporary liberal narratives of civil disobedience as a continuous tradition of conscientious appeal ranging from Socrates to King to Rawls. One consequence of this contemporary canonization (...) of Gandhi’s narrative, however, has been to obscure the radical critique of violence that originally motivated it. This essay draws on Edward Said’s account of travelling theory to unsettle the myth of doctrine that has formed around civil disobedience. By placing Gandhi’s genealogy in the context of his critique of modern civilization, as well as his formative but often-overlooked encounter with the British women’s suffrage movement, it reconstructs Gandhi’s paradoxical notion that sacrificial political action is the fullest expression of self-rule. For Gandhi, Socrates and Thoreau exemplify civil disobedience as a fearless practice of fidelity to truth profoundly at odds with liberal conceptions of disobedience as fidelity to law. (shrink)

Philosophy was at the core of the eighteenth century movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The movement included major figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson, and also many others who produced notable works, such as Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, George Campbell, James Beattie, Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Dugald Stewart. I discuss some of the leading ideas of these thinkers, though paying less attention than I otherwise would to (...) Hume, Smith and Reid, who have separate Encyclopedia entries. Amongst the topics covered in this entry are aesthetics (particularly Hutcheson's), Moral philosophy (particularly Hutcheson's and Smith's), Turnbull's providential naturalism, Kames's doctrines on divine goodness and human freedom, Campbell's criticism of the Humean account of miracles, the philosophy of rhetoric, Ferguson's criticism of the idea of a state of nature, and finally the concept of conjectural history, a concept especially associated with Dugald Stewart. (shrink)

The modern history of experimentation with human beings is notable for its ethical lacunae. In 1865, in his great work, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Dr. Claude Bernard, the French physician who first established the use of the scientific method in medicine, echoed the earlier injunctions of physician-moralist Moses Maimonides in counseling his fellow physicians not to treat their patients solely as a means of advancing knowledge. Yet such cautions had no apparent effect on the physicians who, (...) at the end of the 19th century, studied the transmission of venereal diseases by intentionally infecting poor and institutionalized people without their knowledge, much less their consent. In response... (shrink)

Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius, who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree (...) on what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. I argue that their different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. In the final section of the paper I challenge the traditional view (dating back to Alexander's interpretation of Aristotle) that the use of automata in GA can simply be read off from their use in the de motu. (shrink)

This article analyses how Rousseau's First Discourse and the questions it posed about human progress and the reform of society were debated in the institutional context of the Berlin Academy by Formey and Herder. Despite some important disagreements, Formey and Herder fundamentally shared Rousseau's assumption that erudition could be detrimental both to society and to the individual. In order to limit the socially corrosive effects of the arts and the sciences, and in an attempt to realize their full beneficent potential, (...) they called for their reform through institutional regulation and management by a meritocracy of scholarly experts. Drawing on Hume, Herder in particular developed a positive role for the modern state as an active agent of enlightenment, provided it not only promoted the arts and sciences but also guaranteed freedom and the rule of law to ensure their flourishing. (shrink)

This paper briefly surveys the intellectual context of the lecture “The Office of Justifying Faith" by John Henry Newman. Newman is an outstanding English theologian, writer and philosopher, who had a great influence on the development of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in the 19th and 20th centuries. Newman became one of the leaders of the so-called Tractarian Movement. Tractarians offered a radically new understanding of the relation between the Anglican Church and other ecumenical churches. The most famous (...) expression of this rethinking was the branch theory. According to this theory, the Anglican Church is one of the three branches of a single universal Church alongside the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. According to the Newman's doctrine of via media, Anglican Church represents the middle way between Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches. In the “Lectures on Justification" published in 1838, Newman applies the doctrine of via media to the set of problems that concern the Christian idea of justification. The lecture “The Office of Justifying Faith" is in this sense a very characteristic example of the doctrine of via media. Here Newman demonstrates the difference between the doctrines of the Anglican Church about the relationship between justification and faith and the doctrine of the Protestants about justification by faith only. (shrink)

My argument is that poststructuralist and postmodernist theory carries on and intensifies the main lines of a characteristically modern tradition of aesthetics whose most important point of reference is not French structuralism – as the term, ‘poststructuralism’, implies – but the tradition of 18th-century German romanticism and idealism that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period in Germany between the world wars and afterward. What characterizes this modernist tradition of aesthetics is its valorization of language as a (...) mode of being possessed of an ‘ontological’ status. I place the term ‘ontology’ in quotes in order to highlight the distinction between ‘metaphysics’, with its Aristotelian and neo-Platonic connotations of a ‘chain of being’, and the more modern term ‘ontology’, which was coined in the 17th century and which became widely used during the 18th century by Leibnizian philosophers Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten; the latter, not incidentally, also helped to establish modern usage of the term ‘aesthetics’. ‘Metaphysics’ and ‘ontology’ have their roots, respectively, in those two most major currents of our western heritage, the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian. These currents, although inextricably linked to one another in innumerable ways, have nonetheless been engaged, as Nietzsche put it, ‘in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years’ that has been obscured by Heidegger’s and Derrida’s accounts of the history of western philosophy. Such accounts have projected what is basically a romanticist critique of Enlightenment values and thought on to a totalizing account of the history of Western thought since Plato. My purpose in emphasizing the distinction between metaphysics and ontology is to provide a conceptual framework within which our understanding of the development of modern aesthetics, and the concept of language that informed that development, can be related to the larger philosophical issues at hand. Literary theorists in the United States, by endorsing Heidegger’s and Derrida’s self-serving accounts of their writings as assaults on the entire history of Western philosophy, and by failing to judge them critically as outgrowths of that history, have not only obscured these developments. They have also sustained the central tenet of American literary theory since the 1960s: that there is such a thing as a ‘Western philosophical tradition’ on the ‘other’ side of which, through an endless series of linguistic coinages and ‘erasures’, we may maneuver ourselves. My claim is that to the extent that there is such an other side, we are already on it, and that we fundamentally misunderstand our situation if we regard it as ‘other’ to the Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In 1277, Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, drafted the famous Condemnation of 219 articles in theology and natural philosophy. This Condemnation was a reaction against a group of theologians, led by Siger of Brabant, who were accused of holding that truths of reason could contradict those of revelation. Writing before the Condemnation, which impugned reason's autonomy, Thomas Aquinas critiqued Siger and his followers, and argued that reason could never generate truths that contradict revelation. As a consequence, Aquinas sometimes dwells on (...) reason's limits, terming our knowledge of God 'equivocal' or 'analogical'. Sitting on the other side of the Condemnation, around the turn of the fourteenth century, John Duns Scotus was concerned to secure for reason a portion of its lost dignity. Accordingly, he explores what we can know of God, and lays claim to 'univocal' knowledge of him. Some scholars hold that Scotus's claim to univocal knowledge of God puts him at odds with Aquinas. In this dissertation, I argue that this is not the case, that this apparent discord is largely the result of their different enterprises rather than their basic beliefs about our natural knowledge of God, that Scotus's discussion of univocity is targeted not at Aquinas, but rather at Henry of Ghent---the leading light of the University of Paris at the time that Scotus studied there---and that Scotus does not believe that our knowledge of God is univocal in a strong sense, such that he would claim that it is wholly accurate. Rather, Scotus believes that, in this life, our knowledge of God must comprise abstract concepts that can never do justice to their source. This being the case, he has more in common with Aquinas than some would allow. (shrink)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Pragmatists in Venice Alexander Kremer... 5 I. Philosophy and human evolution Persons as Natural Artifacts Joseph Margolis... 8 II. Cultural politics and democracy Is Marx a Pragmatist? Tom Rockmore... 24 The waxing and waning of democracy as a way of life : Some of the economic underpinnings Jane Skinner... 33 Redefining the Meaning of 'Morality': A Chapter in the Cultural Politics of Capitalism Kenneth W. Stikkers... 42 Imperial Irony: Rorty, Richard Henry Pratt and the (...) American Indian Genocide Scott L Pratt... 48 Bruno Latour, American Pragmatism, and the Idea of Non-Human Democracy Leszek Koczanowicz... 59 Beyond culturalism: A Deweyan reading of the expansion of 'Ndrangheta Matteo Santarelli... 66 Philosophy as Cultural Politics in Rorty, Shusterman, And Pragmatism Alexander Kremer... 79 III. Food, Semiotics, Society John Dewey: A Culinary Perspective Dorota Koczanowicz... 88 De-Subjectification in Semiotics: Argumentations, Self-Defense and Signs of Opposing Forces Martin Svantner... 95 IV. Book Reviews Democracy and Consensus: Review Essay of Leszek Koczanowicz's POLITICS OF DIALOGUE John Ryder... 111 Pragmatism Hotel. R. Calcaterra, G. Maddalena & G. Marchetti : lL PRAGMATISMO. DALLE ORIGINI AGLI SVILUPPI CONTEMPORANEl Brunella Antomarini... 117. (shrink)

Five decades ago, Henry Knowles Beecher, a renowned professor of research anesthesiology, sought to solve a problem created by modern medicine. The solution proposed by Beecher and his colleagues on the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death proved very influential.1 Indeed, other contemporaneous medical developments magnified its significance yet also made the solution it offered somewhat problematic. As we mark this fiftieth anniversary, at a time when concerns about the conceptual (...) model on which its recommendations rested are being voiced by critics from medicine as well as philosophy, it is worthwhile to view the committee's report in relation to the problem that prompted its existence as well as the one to which it was quickly applied. (shrink)

This article brings critical pressure to bear on two different critical terms: modernism and camp. Arguing that these two historically and theoretically weighted categories have much to tell us when read in relation to each other, this article revisits the short fiction of the canonical modernist Virginia Woolf, and debates the critical significance of the work of a hitherto overlooked late modernist, Charles Henri Ford. Comparing and contrasting the very different writing styles of these important modern cultural producers, this article (...) moves to affirm a fresh and queer object of significant scholarly interest: camp modernism. (shrink)

My argument is that poststructuralist and postmodernist theory carries on and intensifies the main lines of a characteristically modern tradition of aesthetics whose most important point of reference is not French structuralism – as the term, ‘poststructuralism’, implies – but the tradition of 18th-century German romanticism and idealism that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period in Germany between the world wars and afterward. What characterizes this modernist tradition of aesthetics is its valorization of language as a (...) mode of being possessed of an ‘ontological’ status. I place the term ‘ontology’ in quotes in order to highlight the distinction between ‘metaphysics’, with its Aristotelian and neo-Platonic connotations of a ‘chain of being’, and the more modern term ‘ontology’, which was coined in the 17th century and which became widely used during the 18th century by Leibnizian philosophers Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten ; the latter, not incidentally, also helped to establish modern usage of the term ‘aesthetics’. ‘Metaphysics’ and ‘ontology’ have their roots, respectively, in those two most major currents of our western heritage, the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian. These currents, although inextricably linked to one another in innumerable ways, have nonetheless been engaged, as Nietzsche put it, ‘in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years’ that has been obscured by Heidegger’s and Derrida’s accounts of the history of western philosophy. Such accounts have projected what is basically a romanticist critique of Enlightenment values and thought on to a totalizing account of the history of Western thought since Plato. My purpose in emphasizing the distinction between metaphysics and ontology is to provide a conceptual framework within which our understanding of the development of modern aesthetics, and the concept of language that informed that development, can be related to the larger philosophical issues at hand. Literary theorists in the United States, by endorsing Heidegger’s and Derrida’s self-serving accounts of their writings as assaults on the entire history of Western philosophy, and by failing to judge them critically as outgrowths of that history, have not only obscured these developments. They have also sustained the central tenet of American literary theory since the 1960s: that there is such a thing as a ‘Western philosophical tradition’ on the ‘other’ side of which, through an endless series of linguistic coinages and ‘erasures’, we may maneuver ourselves. My claim is that to the extent that there is such an other side, we are already on it, and that we fundamentally misunderstand our situation if we regard it as ‘other’ to the Western philosophical tradition. Key Words: Derrida • Heidegger • language • ontology • theory. (shrink)

This book demonstrates that the important educational developments of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, which are often portrayed as new and revolutionary in nature, were in fact the culmination of an evolutionary process more than two centuries old. It also shows that popular literacy was considerably more widespread by the time of Spenser and Shakespeare than most recent studies suggest. The book treats the long period 1348–1648 as a unit by discounting the importance of the year 1485, which marked (...) the end of one dynasty and the beginning of another but had no discernible effect on educational and cultural conditions. Additionally, it argues that the massive changes of the final years of Henry VIII, which momentarily disrupted the universities and the grammar schools of the realm, were beneficial in the long run, since local energies were thereby unleashed and greater public support for educational institutions of all kinds soon materialized. A period of steady growth continued until the 1640s and 1650s, when the bitter experiences of the Civil War and rancorous arguments about the role of the universities and the grammar schools in precipitating the outbreak of hostilities caused the mainstream of public opinion to question the efficacy of advanced education, which increasingly came to be seen as a threat to established values and traditions. Thereafter an era of decline began that lasted until the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, the book treats the important contributions made by both clerics and women during the long period 1348–1648. Although laymen were the greatest beneficiaries of the steady widening of educational opportunity during those three centuries, clerics and women provided most of the funds, without which many fewer colleges, schools, and scholarships for poor boys would have been established. They did so because of their belief that improved education was necessary for the further spread of the Christian message. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 373-376 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation, by Glenn C. Arbery; 255 pp. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2001, $24.95. Over the last decade or so, there has appeared an increasing number of books critical of the profession of literary studies. Such criticism has typically been directed (...) at literary theory and its preoccupation with the politics of race, class, and gender. To a limited extent, Glenn Arbery's Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation can be classified as belonging to such a "genre." Early in the book, for example, Arbery argues in favor of the "old-fashioned" idea, as he calls it, that literature is a "mode of knowledge" with the potential to open up transcendent modes of experience. Yet Why Literature Matters is so short on polemics and so long on incisive, sometimes brilliant readings of works ranging from the poetry and fiction of Seamus Heaney, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, and Emily Dickinson to Shakespeare's Othello and Homer's Iliad, that such a characterization is insufficient at best and distorting at worst. Notwithstanding its title, this book is devoted less to advancing a polemic about "why literature matters" than to dramatizing, with performative power and grace, why most of us, politically oriented or not, are already quite sure that it does.Such performative power can be felt throughout Why Literature Matters, but [End Page 373] its presence is especially strong in the final, lengthy chapter on the Iliad, "The Sacrifice of Achilles." Bringing to bear his training as a classical scholar, Arbery contends that the Iliad is "about" a single event: the death or "sacrifice" of Achilles. Achilles, Arbery notes, was not just the greatest hero of the Iliad. He was also the greatest hero of the entire classical world: "Achilles has no rival in glory, either in the generation of heroes before him (not even Herakles), or in the ages after him. According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar wept because he had not accomplished as much as Alexander at the same age, but Alexander the Great envied Achilles."Why, then, does Arbery refer to Achilles' death as "sacrificial"? Drawing on a version of the Greek myth whose source is Pindar rather than the more commonly cited Hesiod, Arbery observes that Achilles' sacrificial death, which is not in fact narrated in the Iliad but is everywhere taken for granted, was necessitated by Zeus' successful plan to forestall a prophecy. That prophecy said that a son would be born to Zeus and the goddess Thetis, who would overthrow the Olympian god as Zeus had overthrown the Titans. Such a son, prophesized to be not the greatest of mortals but, much more, the greatest of gods, would have been--should have been, from Achilles's justly embittered standpoint--Achilles. But in fact Zeus foiled the prophecy by marrying Thetis off to a mere mortal, Peleus, thereby ensuring his own continued reign and Achilles' eventual death.It is the burden of Arbery's discussion to show not just that Achilles comes to accept and even "will" his own death, but that the meaning of such sacrificial death is embodied and given "presence" in the poetic form and language of the Iliad, including especially the descriptions of Patrocles and Hector, each of whom "inhabits the meaning of Achilles" by dying, successively, in Achilles' armor. Arbery goes so far as to compare Achilles' sacrifice with Christ's, asserting that reading the Iliad "in ignorance of the central importance of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis [is comparable] to reading [Dante's] Inferno (where references to holy things are scarce) in ignorance of the existence of Christ."Arbery makes clear, however, that it is the differences, rather than the similarities, that are most important in such a comparison. Those differences revolve around three issues. First, whereas Christ is a deity who sacrifices himself for humanity, Achilles is a mortal who sacrifices himself for the gods. Second, whereas humanity gains ultimate... (shrink)

"One of the outstanding authorities on the early days of the Republic, Saul K. Padover offers in this volume a generous sampling of the letters, essays, speeches, discourses, and personal documents--many of them previously unpublished--of the men who made America. Included are extensive selections from the papers and speeches of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. There are also copious extracts from the private and public utterances of secondary, but important, figures of (...) the founding days--Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, William Paterson, Benjamin Rush, George Wythe, and many others. A number of the speeches made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 are given in full, and several of the important debates are reproduced. John Dickinson's Letters from an American Farmer in Pennsylvania appear in these pages as well as many of Alexander Hamilton's famous and brief opinions. Also included are John Hancock's speech on the Boston Massacre; Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia; James Madison's Memorial against Religious Assessments; two of the most important of John Marshall's Supreme Court decisions (Marbury vs. Madison and McCulloch vs. Maryland); Robert Morris' Letters on Finance; John Taylor's paper On Aristocracy, and William Paterson's Plan for a Constitution. Taken together, these writings offer in one volume a complete picture of the thinking, the debate, the legal maneuvers, the compromises, the manners, and the morals of the American nation's earliest days. The book provides a sound basic appreciation of the atmosphere in which the Founding Fathers worked and planned and debated with one another. All the many counter-currents that contributed to the building of the Constitution, the stresses to which the young nation was subjected, the rebellion that continued to seethe, the moral climate of the days--these are all recreated in the speeches and writings of America's first patriots. Dr. Padover has bound the selections together with enlightening commentary that enables the reader to understand the exact circumstances of each utterance and brings the particular work into historical perspective."--Jacket. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:84 Reviews THE WAYS OF THE WITTGENSTEINS ACCORDING TO A WAUGH Richard Henry Schmitt U. of Chicago Chicago, il 60637, usa [email protected] AlexanderWaugh. TheHouseofWittgenstein:aFamilyatWar. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Pp. 366. isbn: 0-7475-9185-7. £20.00 (hb). New York: Doubleday, 2009. Pp. 333. isbn: 0-385-52060-3. us$28.95 (hb). Ezach family is happy and unhappy in its own ways. This is hardly surprising zgiven that the family lies at the crossroad of so much (...) human experience. It is the scene for playing out genetics and for working through the rearing and civilizing of children, both nature and nurture. In economic life it constitutes the primary unit, the household. Despite Tolstoy’s ideal, none can ever be com­ pletely happy for every member all the time. And, there is no reason to think that basically happy families are any more the same than unhappy ones. But then none can ever be completely unhappy; or rather, when a family is com­ pletely unhappy it is unlikely that it will remain one. One other factor, however, intrudes on this picture: we tend to be more interested in bad or scandalous news than good. Vicarious experience brings catharsis, possibly helpful in a way. Yet, as the German language recognizes with the word “Schadenfreudez”, we can experience joy at someone else’s sorrow, despite the questions it raises about our empathy. Alexander Waugh is himself the member of a famous family. He has written December 2, 2009 (5:28 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd Reviews 85 its “autobiography” in Fathers and Sons,1 where he is principally concerned with his father Auberon (“Bron”), his grandfather Evelyn, his great-uncle Alec, and his great-grandfather Arthur. Given the family documentation at his disposal and the span of generations, that book covers enough territory, in enough detail, to give us some sense of Waugh family character. You learn what it was like to grow up in the family, down to the odour of Uncle Auberon Herbert’s cologne, “smelling like Cleopatra in her barge on her way to meet Antony for the Wrst time” according to Bron (p. 370, paperback ed.), and the family suspicion that this uncle may have been the illegitimate son of Hilaire Belloc (p. 276). The fathers and sons, from Arthur down to Alexander, all wrote for a living, witty, stylish prose, and sometimes poetry. They especially liked writing about each other in letters, essays, and novels, often to each other in public letters and dedications; and as a consequence Alexander’s book is rich, amusing, intimate, and a bit indiscrete. Arthur’s turn-of-the-century avoidance of emotion in sentimentality grew outmoded, but it was replaced in the family business with newer models, with more Xash and cynicism. When it came to Alexander’s fa­ ther Bron, he was known for his talent at vituperation, and got into verbal and legal scrapes with C. P. Snow and Bertrand Russell among others (p. 407), which led to his getting sacked but only made his journalism more widely read and more valuable to publishers. In Alexander’s disclosure of his family history, there is a sureness of touch that comes from working within his ken. Waugh studied music, and worked as a music critic. In his easy, self-depreci­ ating way, he told an interviewer for The Wall Street Journalz that he got the idea to write this book because of “the most appalling boil on my right index Wnger”. This curtailed his routine enjoyment at the piano, “But then as I sat down and pressed a chord with my left hand I thought of Paul Wittgenstein. I knew about the concerto that Ravel composed for him and I knew that he was Ludwig’s brother. He was bound to have an interesting story.”2 With access to some Witt­ genstein family papers through one of Paul Wittgenstein’s daughters, he began. But a biography of the one-armed pianist soon turned into this “family history”, in part because of the author’s previous success with his own family, but also... (shrink)

Alexander of Aphrodisias, who began his career as a professor of philosophy in Athens under the reign of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, ranks among the most influential of the Greek Aristotle commentators. The works attributed to him, part of the vast collection of ancient commentaries on Aristotle that have come down to us from the period between 200 and 600 A.D., constitute a crucial link in the transmission of Aristotelian thought through Hellenism, late antiquity, and the Islamic world, (...) to the Middle Ages. On a smaller scale, the Alexandrian corpus is an invaluable source for our knowledge of the vicissitudes of third-century Aristotelianism. It represents, in fact, the last and finest stage of a strictly Aristotle-oriented Peripatetic tradition, in a time immediately before the Neoplatonists were to merge Peripatetic, Platonic, and Stoic thought in an all-embracing synthesis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat is a university? In the nineteenth century John Henry Newman famously spoke of “the idea of a university.” This phrase has dominated all discussions of the nature of the university sin...

We have invented, discovered as we were shaping it, and set free from Marc Richir’s philosophy a fundamental element of comprehensibility regarding his phenomenology, which we have called ogkorhythm. The pertinence of this fundamental ogkorhythmic element is also to be found in its great problematic density, giving clarity to that which should be understood by space/time itself in contemporary French phenomenology and, in the context of this contribution, in the work of Max Loreau and Henri Maldiney. Our work mainly concerns (...) the analysis of notions of inherent volume in the work of the former and of rhythm in the work of the latter. Rhythm and volume whose meaning is, in part, derived in the light of ogkorhythm. (shrink)

The 1860s—the epoch of great reforms—brought to Russia a remarkable assortment of official actions that emancipated the serfs, liberalized the judicial system, created zemstva as experiments in limited local self‐government, granted universities an unprecedented scope of academic autonomy, and dramatically enlarged the number of young Russians enrolled in the leading Western universities in search of higher degrees in the sciences. These and similar reforms created an atmosphere favoring women's access to professional positions and contributing to the removal of the harshest (...) aspects of the lingering patriarchal system.Ann Hibner Koblitz's book offers a richly documented and judiciously analyzed portrayal of the widening scope of Russian women's active participation in the professional life of the nation. The book's analysis operates on two levels: the general dynamics of the rising social pressure to expand the range of professions open to women, and the personal experiences of individual women selected for special analysis. Koblitz is fully aware that the process of the emancipation and professional advancement of women was occasionally disrupted by adverse shifts in government policies. Concentrating primarily on the 1860s, this book makes many references to subsequent developments and provides enough documented information to create an adequate picture of the state of women's emancipation and professional employment during the waning decades of the nineteenth century.As might have been expected, Koblitz devotes the most interesting and penetrating analysis to the life and work of the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaia, the brightest star in the emancipation movement and a most respected model of high professional aspiration and achievement. Inspired by the philosophy and ideology of the Nihilist movement of the 1860s, Kovalevskaia decided to enter the challenging world of science, specializing in mathematics, the queen in the world of scientific thought. The Nihilists made the idea of close interdependence of science and democracy a pivotal point of their ideology. Encouraged and guided by the well‐known German mathematician Karl Weierstrass of Göttingen University, Kovalevskaia published a series of mathematical papers that attracted wide professional attention. Henri Poincaré, a leading mathematical physicist, referred to the paper that brought her the Prix Bordin from the Paris Academy of Sciences as a “celebrated memoir.” The Petersburg Academy of Sciences elected Kovalevskaia an honorary member, the first woman to receive such a high honor—she was not, however, allowed to work for a magisterial degree in Russia, a requirement for university employment.Koblitz shows that despite compounded obstructions on the path to professional achievement, women's gains in Russia were equal to those in the West. Her study provides solid information and cogent comments on the historical background and the educational role of the higher courses for women established in all major cities. Women, however, had less difficulty in acquiring higher education than in finding employment commensurate with their professional qualifications. Their employment by institutions devoted to scientific research was almost always at the level of auxiliary personnel. I. P. Pavlov's main laboratory showed that even at this level there were women who not only manifested originality in experimental work but also published advanced scientific papers. In his classic volume on the development of the theory of conditioned reflexes, Pavlov referred to the publications of eleven women.This book is welcome as the first solid effort to draw a general picture of the multiple ramifications of the ascent of Russian women to professional positions in science. It also contributes to a better understanding of the growing movement in favor of broader participation by women in the full spectrum of professional activities. This book is a rich source of topics for special studies. (shrink)

Twelve years after his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man. If the first book brought the gases of philosophi cal controversy to fever heat, the second exploded them in fiery roars. The issue was the nature, the condition, and the destiny of genus humanum. According to the prevailing Genteel Tradition mankind was a congregation of embodied immortal souls, each with its fixed identity, rights and duties, living together with its immortal neigh bors under conditions imposed by (...) "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Obedience or disobedience of these laws destined all to eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What had come to be called "evolution" was assimilated to the Tradition in diverse interpretations such as John Fiske's, Henry Drummond's and Charles Pierce's. Their common ten dency was to establish "evolution" as somehow the method whereby divine providence ordains the conditions under which man accom plishes his destiny. The most productive competitor of the Genteel Tradition went by various names, with positivism, materialism and naturalism the most telling. Its success as competitor was not due to its theological or metaphysical import. Its success flowed from its mode of observing how effects or results, those undesired as well as those desired, got produced. Unified and generalized, these observations were taken for notations of causal sequences always and everywhere the same, thus for laws of "nature" to whose workings "the providence of God" added nothing productive and could be and was dispensed with. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 97-103 [Access article in PDF] MoMA as Educator: The Legacy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Ralph A. Smith Professor Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art by Sybil Gordon Kantor. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, xxv, 472 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-262-11258-2 Sybil Kantor's history of the intellectual origins of (...) the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an engaging account of Alfred Barr, Jr.'s, pivotal role in acquainting an American audience with the modernist movement in art that had developed in Europe and the Soviet Union in the first part of the twentieth century. Scrupulously documented, Kantor's narrative relies heavily on interviews with Barr's contemporaries, his publications, and his extensive correspondence. She also limns portraits of major figures who either influenced his ideas or were instrumental in establishing MoMA. Although the book is very informative about modern art, according to its author it is not intended to be strictly a history of that art. Rather, it is devoted to Barr's early development, his personal characteristics, his attitude toward the cultural and political climate of the times, his definitions of modernism and formalism, and finally, his legacy.Kantor traces Barr's career through the decade of the 1920s, which culminated in his being named the first director of MoMA in 1929; the expansive years of the 1930s and 1940s when, as Kantor puts it, Barr and the museum were at full throttle; and the later years when Barr was relieved of his director's responsibilities to allow him to spend more time on writing and the mounting of exhibitions. He retired from the museum in 1967, began to show signs of ill health in the mid-1970s, and died at the age of 79 in 1981. The Early Years Barr began his studies in the history of art at Princeton where he took courses with Frank Jewett Mather, who taught about modern art, and with Charles Rufus Morey, a distinguished medievalist whose teaching ranged beyond the architecture and sculpture of the Middle Ages to the other arts of that era. Morey's example of comprehensiveness would later stimulate Barr to think along similar lines about modern art and the organization of MoMA. At Harvard's graduate school Barr learned the skills of connoisseurship and museum management from Paul Sachs whose students went on to become directors of major museums across America. Sachs also encouraged Barr's interest in modern art and provided him with numerous letters of [End Page 97] introduction to scholars and museum directors — and occasionally withfunds for his travels.1 Lincoln Kirstein was a close friend, art critic, and earlyally, while Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, and Philip Johnson significantly affected Barr's understanding of architecture. A large cast of artists, patrons, collectors, writers, trustees, and editors of "little magazines"(so-called because of their relatively small numbers of readers) also enter the scene and play various roles. A few words are in order about Barr himself who, Kantor says, exhibited more rebelliousness, a larger vision, and greater discipline than most of those around him. Barr the Man Kantor portrays a mind and sensibility possessed of exceptional discernment for the new, the difficult, and the worthwhile in the art of the early twentieth century. Barr's feeling for order, organization, and clarity of relations; his commitment to perfection, freedom, and truth; and his faith in the capacity of modern art to overcome prejudices and improve the taste of Americans are not merely reflections of the disciplinary habits inculcated by Barr's Presbyterian upbringing. They also reveal the classical tastes acquired through his art-historical studies and echo the temper of the age.The time — the 1920s through the 1940s — valued both the rationalism of science with its methods of problem solving and the insights of psychoanalysis with its probing of the irrational. Belief in the inevitable progress promised by advances in technology was, however... (shrink)

Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early (...) Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated. (shrink)

Giroux argues that challenge gives new meaning to the importance of resistance, the relevance of pedagogy, and the significance of political agency.

Since 1992, Border Crossings has show cased Henry A. Giroux's extraordinary range as a thinker by bringing together a series of essays that refigure the relationship between post-modernism, feminism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. With discussions of topics including the struggle over academic canon, the role of popular culture in the curriculum and the cultural war the New Right has waged on schools, Giroux identified the most pressing issues facing critical educators at the turn of the century. In this (...) revised edition, Giroux reflects on the limits and possibilities of border crossings in the 21st century. "Borders" in our post 9/11 world have not been collapsing, he argues, but vigorously rebuilt. In order to have a truly critically engaged citizenry the challenges of these new "borders"- such as the increased militarization of public spaces, the rise of neo-liberalism, and the war in Iraq- must play a vital role in any debate on school and pedagogy. (shrink)

Owen revisited Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9447-7 Authors Henry A. McGhie, The Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Experimental observations are often taken in order to assist in making a choice between relevant hypotheses ∼ H and H. The power of observations in this decision is here metrically defined by information-theoretic concepts and Bayes' theorem. The exact (or maximum power) of a new observation to increase or decrease Pr(H) the prior probability that H is true; the power of that observation to modify the total amount of uncertainty involved in the choice between ∼ H and H: the power (...) of a new observation to reduce uncertainty toward the ideal amount, zero; all these powers are systematically shown to be exact metrical functions of Pr(H) and Pr(o/H)/Pr(o)-1 where the numerator is the likelihood of the new observation given H, and the denominator is the "expectedness" of the observation. (shrink)