In 1648, J. Marcus Marci of Prague anticipated two chief features of Isaac Newton's celebrated 1672 theory of light and color, namely that colors are inherent to light and that the role of the prism is to separate the rays of color by means of refraction. Furthermore, Marci argued that colors produced by a first refraction are immutable when subjected to refraction by a second prism. This paper argues that the key to Marci's achievement derived from his chymical view of (...) light, which he tested by means of prism trials and geometrical constructions. I also suggest that Marci's unusual coupling of chymical philosophy with mathematics was a move unusual in the history of alchemy; and that his chymical understanding of light belongs to an underexplored tradition in the history of optics, which is distinct from mechanistic and Aristotelian theories of light. (shrink)

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother’s lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues (...) resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother’s vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but—dare he admit it?—strangely on target. In this landmark book, Nobel Prize–winning writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello’s own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction—Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee’s text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation. (shrink)

Introduction to one of the most important, controversial, and suggestive works of moral philosophy ever written.

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

This volume contains ten essays that treat the relationship between Kant’s philosophy and those of his predecessors in the early modern canon. The essays divide into five pairs devoted respectively to Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. In each case, the work of a prominent Kant scholar precedes a reply by an early modernist. This format provides the opportunity to reevaluate both Kant’s philosophy and those of his predecessors, the contention being that the latter “in our historical conscience” too often (...) are read “in light of Kant’s reconstruction of their thought” .In this review, I discuss a selection of the articles in order to evaluate the extent to which they contribute to the stated historiographic aim of the volume. Each of the ten contributions provides a worthwhile read in isolation from the others, but the success they achieve in reassessing the relationship of Kantian to pre-Kantian philosophy varies significantly from essay to essay. Cumulatively, they offer an inspiring retort to the central arguments of that chapter of modern philosophy entitled “On the division of all philosophies into vorkantische and nachkantische. (shrink)

The mechanistic theory of life.--Criticism of the mechanistic theory.--Biology and the physical sciences.--Personality.

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

Hereditary structural completeness is established for a range of substructural logics, mainly without the weakening rule, including fragments of various relevant or many-valued logics. Also, structural completeness is disproved for a range of systems, settling some previously open questions.

The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory – providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)

The influence which the Pythagorean society and its leading doctrines exercised upon Athenian intellectual and political developments in the late fifth century leads us to seek in Pythagoras a figure of greater stature and more clear-cut features than modern scholarship is prepared to allow. To us he is a great name but little more, the large body of detailed information about his life which is available in later writers being dismissed as fabulous. This scepticism was reasonable enough when the reader (...) was faced with the garbled hotchpotch of an Iamblichus or a Porphyry. But since the task has been put in hand of determining what portions of this tradition can safely be attributed to the various authorities who concerned themselves with the Pythagorean story in the fourth century, and of considering the respective historical value of these authorities, the scepticism of, for example, Burnet's account becomes unjustified. It is now possible to present a fairly detailed account of Pythagoras' activity, which has at least as much claim to credence as a great deal of what we now readily accept as ancient history, and is furthermore consistent with the general picture of the man that emerges from a careful scrutiny of classical sources. Not only for its own sake, but in the context of the increasingly fruitful investigation of fifth-century Athenian movements, I feel that it may be useful to put together such an account of Pythagoras. It will certainly be regarded by some as mere fiction, but may nevertheless provide others with a convenient summary of what the fifth- and fourth-century writers thought and believed about a man and a movement that had profound influence upon their times. I hope at the same time to suggest some links between what Pythagoras thought and did and the main tradition of Greek social behaviour. If Pythagoras was, as I believe, not so much an innovator as a reformer and developer of some of the central institutions of Greek life, the possibility will be opened of regarding various phenomena in mainland Greece which we have been asked to call Pythagorean, e.g. the Socratic phrontisterion as it appears in the Clouds, not as deriving from Pythagoras but as a parallel growth to the Pythagorean synedria and nourished by the same root. (shrink)

Current general restrictions on performance-enhancing drugs pose a collective action problem that cannot be solved and bring a variety of adverse consequences for sport. General prohibitions of PEDs are grounded in claims that they violate the integrity of sport. But there are decisive arguments against integrity of sport-based prohibitions of PEDs for elite sport. We defend a harm prevention approach to PED prohibition as an alternative. This position cannot support a general ban on PEDs, since it provides no basis for (...) prohibiting non-harmful PED use. We argue that a harm prevention approach to restricting PEDs is ethically justified, has better prospects of compliance, is consistent with respecting the integrity of sport, and holds at least a modest prospect of resolving the collective action problem around PED restriction. (shrink)

The American Society for Microbiology addresses issues of research integrity in several ways. There is a Code of Ethics for Society members and an Ethics Committee, a Publications Board has editorial oversight of ethical issues involved in Society journals and other publications, and the Public and Scientific Affairs Board is involved in ethical issues and scientific policies at the national level. In addition, the Society uses meetings and publications to inform and educate members about research integrity.