Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) stresses the American character of Kahane's thought. This review analyzes this claim in two ways. First, it offers a transnational perspective on Kahane's philosophy. Second, it examines Magid's concept of neo‐Kahanism in light of Kahane's legacy in Israel.

Neoliberal precepts of the governance of academic science-deregulation; reification of markets; emphasis on competitive allocation processes have been conflated with those of performance management—if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it—into a single analytical and consequent single programmatic worldview. As applied to the United States’ system of research universities, this conflation leads to two major divergences from relationships hypothesized in the governance of science literature. (1) The governance and financial structures supporting academic science in the United States’ system of (...) higher education are sufficiently different from those found in many other OECD countries where these policies have been adopted to produce political pressures for an increase rather than a decrease in governmental control over university affairs. (2) The major impact upon academic science of performance measurement systems has come not externally from new government requirements but internally from the independent adoption of these techniques by universities, initially in the name of rational management and increasingly as devices to foster reputational enhancement. The overall thrust of the two trends in the U.S. has been less a shift as experienced elsewhere from bureaucratic to market modes of governance than the displacement of professional-collegial control by internal bureaucratic control. (shrink)

Postural instability in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by impaired postural responses to transient perturbations, increased postural sway in stance and difficulty transitioning between tasks. In addition, some studies suggest that loss of dopamine in the basal ganglia due to PD results in difficulty using proprioceptive information for motor control. Here, we quantify the ability of subjects with PD and age-matched control subjects to use and re-weight sensory information for postural control during steady-state conditions of continuous rotations of the stance (...) surface or visual surround. We measure the postural sway of subjects in response to a pseudorandom, surface-tilt stimulus with eyes closed, and in response to a pseudorandom, visual-tilt stimulus. We use a feedback control model of the postural control system to interpret our results, focusing on sensory weighting as a function of stimulus amplitude. We find that subjects with PD can re-weight their dependence upon sensory information in response to changes in surface- or visual-stimulus amplitude. Specifically, subjects with PD behaved like age-matched control subjects by decreasing proprioceptive contribution to stance control with increasing surface-tilt amplitude, and decreasing visual contribution with increasing visual-tilt amplitude. However, subjects with PD do not decrease their reliance on proprioception as much as age-matched controls for small increases in surface-stimulus amplitudes. Levodopa medication did not affect sensory re-weighting behaviors for postural control. The impairment in PD subject’s ability to respond differently to small changes in surface rotation amplitudes is consistent with an increased threshold for perceiving proprioceptive signals, which may result from decreased signal-to-noise in the dopaminergic pathways associated with sensory processing and/or sensory integration. (shrink)

Es wird untersucht, wie weit den empirischen Bestätigungen der logistischen Differentialgleichung als Ausdruck eines biologischen Wachstumsgesetzes tatsächliche Beweiskraft zukommt. Durch eine Reihe praktischer Ausgleichungen wurde geprüft, welche Güte der Annäherung im Durchschnitt zu erwarten ist, wenn durch eine beliebige andere dreiparametrige ScharS-förmiger Kurven ersetzt wird und ). Es zeigt sich überraschenderweise, dass sich die logistische Kurve keineswegs besonders gut dem biologischen Material anpasst, und dass letzteres auch mit ganz anderen Hypothesen vereinbar wäre. Ähnliches gilt auch von den Experimenten vonGause bewiesen (...) werden sollte). - Dies schmälert keineswegs die besondere Eignung von zur Beschreibung von biologischen Wachstumsvorgängen, doch beruht sie z. T. auf den mathematischen Eigenschaften, und noch mehr auf der grossen Plausibilität, die den zu führenden Grundannahmen von vornherein zukommt. Dem empirischen Material kommt bisher gar keine selbstständige Beweiskraft zu, und es ist in keinem Spezialfall erlaubt, aus einer Übereinstimmung eines Wachstumsvorgangs mit auf dessen innere Natur und auf die wirkenden Kräfte Rückschlüsse zu ziehen.On examine le degré de sûreté qu'ont les vérifications empiriques de la loi logistique de croissance biologique. Pour estimer la bonté de Ja concordance on a ajusté aux observations d'autres courbes dépendants de trois constantes et ressemblant à et ). On trouve que la concordance de la loi logistique n'est nullement aussi excellente que l'on croit par avance et que le matériel empirique serait très bien compatible avec des hypothèses tout différentes. Cela est valable aussi pour les experiments deGause . — Malgré cela la loi logistique reste l'instrument le plus utile pour la description des phénomènes de croissance, mais cela tient en partie à ses propriétés analytiques, et encore plus à la plausibilité des hypothèses qui conduisent à . Les vérifications empiriques n'augmentent pas cette évidence apriorique, et dans n'importe quel cas spécial une concordance des observations avec la loi logistique ne permet aucune conclusion sur la nature du phénomène et les forces agissantes. (shrink)

Science indicators are increasingly used in policy-making. However, failure to relate interpretations of specific measures to the historical development of science can lead to errors in assessing past investments and in prioritizing future investments. This article outlines some of these sources of error, and argues for the more systematic use of historical evidence in the formulation of science policy.

How do attempts to foresee the future actually change it? For thousands of years, humans have called upon foresight to shape their own actions in order to adapt and survive; as Charles Darwin revealed in his theory of natural selection, the capacity to do just that is key to the origin of species. The uses of foresight, however, can also be applied to help us further our understanding across a variety of realms in everything from warfare, journalism and music, to (...) ancient civilizations, space weather and science. In a thought-provoking new addition to the Darwin College Lecture Series, eight distinguished authors each present an essay from their area of expertise devoted to the theme of 'foresight'. This provocative read reveals foresight as a process that can be identified across all areas of human endeavour, an art which can not only predict the future, but make it anything but inevitable. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Had Never Heard Someone Use That Word BeforeAdrienne Feller NovickThe patient was dying. As the social worker, I had arranged the meeting and sat shoulder to shoulder with the family and the attending physician in the small nondescript room. The family was grief-stricken and asked intelligent questions as they made difficult decisions about end-of-life care for their loved one. The doctor spoke with gentle kindness, acknowledging their (...) difficult decision as he completed the neon pink Medical Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (MOLST) form and left the room. I was tangled up with emotions; I felt relieved that the meeting had gone smoothly, sad for the patient and family, and in awe of the doctor for his ability to lead the difficult conversation. I stayed behind to ask the family if there was anything I could do to help them. [End Page E4]Before I could speak, the patient's wife turned to me and said, "I am so glad that k--- left the room." (Using a derogatory word for a person of the Jewish faith). My brain began processing the statement. I am a Jewish woman. Did I hear that right? Did she say what I think she said? Should I say something? I froze, and time seemed to stop. She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for a response. Her face reminded me of someone waiting for the other person to return a "high five." I was flooded with emotion. A succession of thoughts ran through my head, everything from being rude in response or getting physical. I did neither. I said nothing. I smiled and left the room feeling like I had been gut-punched.I was in denial. I made excuses for the wife; she was stressed. I kept thinking I must not have heard her correctly and that I was overreacting. I continued to work with the family as though nothing had happened until the patient died five days later. I felt ashamed and never told anyone about what happened. I regretted not saying anything. I replayed the conversation in my mind and felt depressed and angry. Inside I felt complicit for not speaking up, but I had no words. I assumed bias in healthcare was rare. I did nothing.Years later, after I completed a patient visit in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), I observed a group of surgical residents doing rounds. The attending welcomed me to join this valuable clinical learning experience. As the group approached the next bed, the patient pointed to one resident and loudly said, "I don't want a doctor who looks like that to come near me." I gasped aloud and froze, waiting to see what would happen next. The attending looked directly at the patient and said calmly, "We are all here to help you. That is not an appropriate thing for you to say." Then, he turned to the resident and nodded, directing them to resume their bedside assessment. The patient mumbled something inaudibly and said nothing.To my astonishment, the doctor acknowledged the microaggression (a microaggression is a statement, action, or incident regarded as discrimination), addressed the issue, respectfully supported the resident, created a safe space for everyone on the healthcare team and resumed quality patient care without missing a beat. He modeled a strategy to address patient bias and taught a valuable skill. This was a learning moment for me. It helped me refocus my past experience and provided me with a useful strategy to address bias in the future.As a member of the medical ethics consultation service, I listen, provide support, and aid in challenging communications. I had the opportunity to model the communication strategy I acquired in the ICU. The medical ethics team was consulted for a patient refusing treatment. The patient was disrespectful to healthcare team members, cursing at nurses and residents, using ethnic slurs, and saying he "would rather die than let one of them touch him. I entered the patient's room with the healthcare team, introduced myself, and explained the reason for my visit. The patient defiantly agreed he had used slurs, saying he wanted to go home. I continued, everyone here... (shrink)

The traditional characterization of Charles Darwin as a strong advocate of physiological experimentation on animals was posited in Richard French’s Antivivisection and medical science in Victorian England, where French portrayed him as a soldier in Thomas Huxley’s efforts to preserve anatomical experimentation on animals unfettered by government regulation. That interpretation relied too much on, inter alia, Huxley’s own description of the legislative battles of 1875, and shared many historians’ propensity to foster a legacy of Darwin as a leader among a (...) new wave of scientists, even where personal interests might indicate a conflicting story. Animal rights issues concerned more than mere science for Darwin, however, and where debates over other scientific issues failed to inspire Darwin to become publicly active, he readily joined the battle over vivisection, helping to draft legislation which, in many ways, was more protective of animal rights than even the bills proposed by his friend and anti-vivisectionist, Frances Power Cobbe. Darwin may not have officially joined Cobbe’s side in the fight, but personal correspondence of the period between 1870 and 1875 reveals a man whose first interest was to protect animals from inhumane treatment, and second to protect the reputations of those men and physiologists who were his friends, and who he believed incapable of inhumane acts. On this latter point he and Cobbe never did reach agreement, but they certainly agreed on the humane treatment of animals, and the need to proscribe various forms of animal experimentation. (shrink)

Contingency is the presence of non-actualized possibility in the world. Fatalism is a view of reality on which there is no contingency. Since it is contingency that permits agency, there has traditionally been much interest in contingency. This interest has long been embarrassed by the contention that simple and plausible assumptions about the world lead to fatalism. I begin with an Aristotelian argument as presented by Richard Taylor. Appreciation of this argument has been stultified by a question pertaining to the (...) source of necessity and possibility and a closely related one regarding the nature of metaphysics itself. Answering these questions reveals the crucial issue here, to wit, necessity and possibility in a temporal world. This issue is investigated through an important later criticism of Taylor by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s critique is significant because it brings to the fore the pivotal notion for understanding contingency in a temporal world, that of synchronic possibility, the idea that incompatible states of affairs are possible at a single moment. This notion provides the basis of distinguishing two systematic accounts of truth, modality and time: two metaphysics of contingency. On one account, Taylor’s Aristotelian argument is straightforwardly valid and compelling; on the other, it is fallacious. In closing, I present reasons why the former account, supporting the Aristotelian views of time and truth, is correct and make some comments to ameliorate this conclusion. (shrink)

Le vieillissement de la population que connaît la France au début du XXe siècle donne lieu à la mise en accusation des femmes, notamment des femmes âgées, qui commencent à vieillir plus nombreuses et plus longtemps que les hommes. La vieillesse des femmes, définie par des critères conventionnels autant que biologiques, dévaluée sur le plan social, ignorée sur le plan médical, figée dans des représentations péjoratives, devient un moment particulièrement sensible de leur cycle de vie où, au-delà des contraintes et (...) des soumissions de leur vie adulte, se dessine pour elles la possibilité de transgresser ou de recomposer les rôles traditionnels. Alors que se met en place une protection sociale étroitement liée à la salarisation de la main-d’oeuvre, l’évolution des systèmes de retraite marginalisent, non seulement les plus âgées, mais l’ensemble des femmes dont la fonction sociale n’est pas reconnue. A travers le problème du vieillissement et de la vieillesse se joue à de multiples niveaux la question du statut des femmes dans nos sociétés occidentales. (shrink)

Le vieillissement de la population que connaît la France au début du XXe siècle donne lieu à la mise en accusation des femmes, notamment des femmes âgées, qui commencent à vieillir plus nombreuses et plus longtemps que les hommes. La vieillesse des femmes, définie par des critères conventionnels autant que biologiques, dévaluée sur le plan social, ignorée sur le plan médical, figée dans des représentations péjoratives, devient un moment particulièrement sensible de leur cycle de vie où, au-delà des contraintes et (...) des soumissions de leur vie adulte, se dessine pour elles la possibilité de transgresser ou de recomposer les rôles traditionnels. Alors que se met en place une protection sociale étroitement liée à la salarisation de la main-d’oeuvre, l’évolution des systèmes de retraite marginalisent, non seulement les plus âgées, mais l’ensemble des femmes dont la fonction sociale n’est pas reconnue. A travers le problème du vieillissement et de la vieillesse se joue à de multiples niveaux la question du statut des femmes dans nos sociétés occidentales. (shrink)

chapter The whole and its parts Towards a holistic understanding of language Human beings are social entities. We are a family member, a brother or a sister ...

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

The X-ray and bulk densities of PdIn alloys have been determined at ambient temperature on samples annealed at 1273 and 1373 K and quenched in water-ice mixtures. From these measurements the vacancy concentrations in this intermetallic phase have been obtained as a function of In concentration at these two temperatures. In addition, a generalized thermodynamic model is presented which considers the existence of antisite and vacancy defects on both sublattices without any dilute solution approximations. This model uses three energy parameters, (...) whose values have been obtained for PdIn using the measured vacancy concentrations and the chemical potentials of In. This model is able to describe all the available vacancy data and is suitable for calculating these values at compositions and temperatures when such data are not available. In addition, the model permits the calculation of the concentrations of the minority point defects. It is shown that dilute-solution approximations, which have invariably been used in this kind of modelling, are unsatisfactory. The present results and their analysis confirm that PdIn is a near-triple-defect type of intermetallic and not a near-Schottky type, as has been claimed recently. (shrink)

Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.

Early in his Essays on Intellectual Powers, Reid draws a distinction between mental power, mental operation, and mental capacity (EIP 21). To the untrained eye, these terms could probably be used interchangeably, and Reid believes this is correct, up to a point. He argues that, if we are interested in understanding exactly how the human mind works, we must use these terms with more precise meanings. This is part of his more general strategy of trying to always use the words (...) with their common meanings, as much as possible, but also pointing out that certain philosophical distinctions are needed to carry out the project of laying out the foundations of the science of the mind. This paper explains what the distinction between power, operation, and capacity is, according to Reid, with the goal of understanding why it is important to draw such a distinction, not only for the Reidian project, but for action theory, more generally. (shrink)

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals as the (...) most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)