Purpose: Moral distress occurs when one identifies an ethically appropriate course of action but cannot carry it out. In this conceptualization, medical students may be particularly vulnerable to m...

Waterman's clinical anecdote highlights several important concepts related to aging, as his own journey with chronic pain leads him to explore an "unconventional" craniosacral therapy. He draws important connections between epistemic humility and wisdom, and he touches on related topics of cognitive neuroscience and ageism. In particular, his comment that, "Perhaps one hallmark of successful aging is when the growth of wisdom outpaces the depletion of mental plasticity" is ripe for further discussion.Waterman asks the question of whether epistemic humility results (...) from wisdom. While I surmise that the answer is yes, these concepts present interesting questions related to the nature of wisdom in the context of... (shrink)

Having a serious illness like breast cancer is a calamity for individuals and families. Along with the pain, discomfort, and dislocation comes the issue of how to pay the medical expenses for the care and treatment of the disease. If the seriously ill person has inadequate or no insurance, these problems are aggravated.Stories abound about seriously ill people losing private health insurance following diagnosis with a catastrophic disease, remaining in jobs just to maintain health insurance, or facing financial hardship because (...) of gaps in coverage. Yet surprisingly little research has focused on the problems that people with serious illness face with health coverage and, in particular, how concerns about access to health insurance coverage shape their lives.Further, despite profoundly moving anecdotes of cancer victims and other seriously ill people about their problems with health insurance and despite recent federal and state efforts to reform the private health insurance market in ways discussed below, neither the federal government, states, nor the private sector has crafted comprehensive strategies to enhance health coverage for the seriously ill. (shrink)

Having a serious illness like breast cancer is a calamity for individuals and families. Along with the pain, discomfort, and dislocation comes the issue of how to pay the medical expenses for the care and treatment of the disease. If the seriously ill person has inadequate or no insurance, these problems are aggravated.Stories abound about seriously ill people losing private health insurance following diagnosis with a catastrophic disease, remaining in jobs just to maintain health insurance, or facing financial hardship because (...) of gaps in coverage. Yet surprisingly little research has focused on the problems that people with serious illness face with health coverage and, in particular, how concerns about access to health insurance coverage shape their lives.Further, despite profoundly moving anecdotes of cancer victims and other seriously ill people about their problems with health insurance and despite recent federal and state efforts to reform the private health insurance market in ways discussed below, neither the federal government, states, nor the private sector has crafted comprehensive strategies to enhance health coverage for the seriously ill. (shrink)

This paper will argue that many survivors’ ability to take up their existence hopefully is rooted in the deeply visceral and unintegrable memory of “living the existence of a walking corpse” (Niederland 1968b, 12) that constitutes the ontic basis for their most fundamental presence to self, others, and God. I will show, secondly, that Karl Rahner’s theological formulation of witness as “an act of self transcendence in which the subject reaches up to the unsurpassable and sovereign Mystery which we call (...) God” (TI 13, 155-6) does indeed provide the basis for some survivors’ hopeful decision about and disposal of the self in relation to God to the extent that hope inscribed in the memory of “living the existence of a walking corpse” does become expressed as the “one, unifying ‘outwards from the self’ attitude into God as the absolutely uncontrollable” (TI 10, 250) by sustaining the commitment to witness. However I will also argue, finally, that the unintegrable nature of such memory prevents survivor hope-as-witness to be completely reconciled with the theological sense of witness that Rahner proposes because his vision of witness has not taken adequately into account this unintegrable memory and its long-term effects. (shrink)

Reading the Shape of Nature vividly recounts the turbulent early history of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the contrasting careers of its founder Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander. Through the story of this institution and the individuals who formed it, Mary P. Winsor explores the conflicting forces that shaped systematics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Debates over the philosophical foundations of classification, details of taxonomic research, the young institution's financial struggles, and the (...) personalities of the men most deeply involved are all brought to life. In 1859, Louis Agassiz established the Museum of Comparative Zoology to house research on the ideal types that he believed were embodied in all living forms. Agassiz's vision arose from his insistence that the order inherent in the diversity of life reflected divine creation, not organic evolution. But the mortar of the new museum had scarcely dried when Darwin's Origin was published. By Louis Agassiz's death in 1873, even his former students, including his son Alexander, had defected to the evolutionist camp. Alexander, a self-made millionaire, succeeded his father as director and introduced a significantly different agenda for the museum. To trace Louis and Alexander's arguments and the style of science they established at the museum, Winsor uses many fascinating examples that even zoologists may find unfamiliar. The locus of all this activity, the museum building itself, tells its own story through a wonderful series of archival photographs. (shrink)

Writing about testimonies from the concentration camps poses a fundamental problem to those who undertake this task, for one cannot lightly broach the still-living history of the Nazi camps. Auschwitz “is not a subject for a colloquium” or, at least, not a subject like others. For the deportees themselves, speaking up is not easy. In whose name can they speak, in the name of what can they remember, how can they say it and to whom? Such are the first questions (...) which arise like so many obstacles to communication. How to express the inexpressible? Such is the problem lying at the heart of all the testimonies, inasmuch as their credibility but also their possibility of existing depend on it. As Yves Reuter points out, the question of form appears in its most crucial aspect here: Neither history nor textual theory can overlook the concentration camp testimonies, extreme discourses of an extreme experience. To be concerned with form is not at all secondary. The obsessive “how to say it” of the accounts in this case seems of capital importance to me. (shrink)

Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror explores the historical trauma of the 1975–6 siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tal el–Zaatar in Beirut and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants by Christian militias. Analogous to Holocaust writing, Badr's fictionalized history, grounded in actual survivor testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory, but does so from a specifically female perspective. Collapsing the personal and political, private and public, inside and outside through figured violations of bodies and psyches, (...) Badr repositions women at the centre of the Palestinians’ struggle for and story of survival. Badr's novel traces the annihilation of the possibility of address, accompanied by self–loss and the ability to witness, and the laborious recreation of address. Claiming authority on the basis of the emotional, visceral truth of suffering, she seeks to break the endless cycle of an oppressive and impotent masculine history, constructing an alternative history which at least attempts to address the voice of cultural, national, and gender difference. (shrink)

Based on a sociological survey carried out in a camp for asylum seekers in Belgium, the article questions the modes of existence in this “out of place” and “out of time” that is the camp. Behind the apparent emptiness of waiting in a decelerated present, the investigation highlights three temporalities that together shape the breathing of the camp and the living conditions of asylum seekers: the rhythm of the framework that holds together daily life, the cycle and (...) the passage that gives a sense of the ordeal and finally the singular time of the articulations between present, past and future which characterize the “being in time” of asylum seekers. After exploring these three temporalities, the author proposes a concept that allows them to hold together in order to understand the texture of time that unfolds in these “out of place”, “out of time” that are the camps. (shrink)

L’article se propose d’explorer l’univers des facultés de droit sous la République de Weimar, que les contemporains jugent en « crise ». Cette perception renvoie tout d’abord aux difficultés d’adaptation d’un enseignement qui est de plus en plus écartelé entre les exigences de la science (transmettre une compréhension historique de l’évolution du droit) et celles de la pratique (préparer les étudiants au monde professionnel par une connaissance du droit en vigueur) : l’Université apparaît ainsi comme un lieu de confrontation entre (...) professeurs et autorités étatiques pour le contrôle du cursus juridique. Par ailleurs, dans un contexte de grande expansion des effectifs étudiants, les facultés de droit ne connaissent pas de démocratisation de leur public et restent le domaine des élites traditionnelles ; de ce fait, elles semblent en décalage avec leur époque et continuent de former un univers passéiste que conforte l’engagement des étudiants dans des corporations traditionnelles. Ce mode de socialisation explique leur radicalisation dans le camp antirépublicain dès les années 1920. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:EugenicsMary Carrington Coutts (bio) and Pat Milmoe McCarrick (bio)The word eugenics (from the Greek eugenes or well-born) was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, an Englishman and cousin of Charles Darwin, who applied Darwinian science to develop theories about heredity and good or noble birth (I, Kevles 1985, p. x).The entry under "eugenics" in the Encyclopedia of Bioethics notes that the term has had different meanings in different eras: (...) "a science that investigates methods to ameliorate the genetic composition of the human race; a program to foster such betterment; a social movement; and in its perverted form, a pseudo-scientific retreat for bigots and racists" (V, Ludmerer 1978, p. 457). Kevles, who places a stronger emphasis than Ludmerer on the degeneration of eugenics, says that by 1935 it "had become 'hopelessly perverted' into a pseudoscientific facade for 'advocates of race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally'" (I, Kevles 1985, p. 164).Phrases such as "survival of the fittest" and "struggle for existence" came into use at the end of the nineteenth century when eugenics societies were created throughout the world to popularize genetic science. "Negative eugenics" utilized marriage restriction, sterilization, or custodial commitment of those thought to have unwanted characteristics. "Positive eugenics" tried to encourage the population perceived as "superior" to have more offspring (V, Ludmerer 1978, p. 459).In the United States, after World War I, new information, such as the importance of environmental influences and the more complex concept of multi-gene effects in inheritance, diminished the scientific justification for eugenics, but this knowledge did not decrease the pressure for legislation, judicial action, or immigration controls. The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 favored immigration from northern Europe and greatly restricted the entry of persons from other areas referred to as "biologically inferior." Between 1907 and 1937, 32 [End Page 163] states required sterilization of various citizens viewed as undesirable: the mentally ill or handicapped; those convicted of sexual, drug, or alcohol crimes; and others viewed as "degenerate" (V, Larson 1991).In Germany, interest in eugenics flourished after the turn of the century when Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded the Archives of Race-Theory and Social Biology in 1904 and the German Society of Racial Hygiene in 1905. The German term Rassenhygiene or race hygiene encompassed more than the word "eugenics;" it included all attempts to improve hereditary qualities as well as measures directed at population increase (III, Weiss 1987). By the 1920s, various German textbooks incorporated ideas of heredity and racial hygiene, and German professors were participating in the international eugenics movement. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927; by 1933 a sterilization law, the Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, which originally was entitled "Eugenics in the Service of Public Welfare," indicated compulsory sterilization "for the prevention of progeny with hereditary defects" in cases of "congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy... and severe alcoholism." (III, Müller-Hill 1988, p. 10).The co-mingling of science, politics, and Weltanschauung (ideological or religious world view) caused the darkest period for eugenics when Nazi Germans embarked on their "final solution" to the Jewish "problem", or the Holocaust. The Nazi racial-hygiene program began with involuntary sterilizations and ended with genocide. Beginning with the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, 350,000 schizophrenic and other mentally ill persons were involuntarily sterilized, and marriage or sexual contact between Jews and other Germans was banned. Several hundred black children and 30,000 German Gypsies were sterilized. By 1945, when the allies liberated those remaining in Nazi concentration camps, six million Jews, 750,000 Gypsies, and 70,000 German psychiatric patients had been killed by the Nazis (III, Müller-Hill 1992, p. 47). As a result of the German experience, eugenic thought dropped to its nadir, and to the present day, the term "eugenics" invokes a sense of horror in some people.Great Britain, the United States, and Germany were the countries most involved with eugenic science in the first half of this century, but interest was present in Europe and other... (shrink)

RésuméSoixante‐cinq ans après sa publication, la controverse que l'article #Einstein, Podolsky et Rosen suscita à propos de I'image de l'univers physique suggérée par le formalisme de la théorié quantique n'est pas close. Elle oppose une minorité«localiste», petit cercle de physiciens réalistes partisans de la localitéd’ Einstein, á une majorité«non localisten» adepte – non uniformément, cependant – des prédictions non locales de la thhrie quantique et de l'Interprétation dite positiviste de Copenhague érigée principalement sur la philosophie de Bohr et de Heisenberg.Les (...) arguments, les modèles avands par des physiciens de ces deux camps philosophiques et les tests expkrimentaux, passb ou futurs, destinb depuis les InBgalités de Bell à trancher cette controverse sont présidera à la lumière de I'enjeu percu par une minorité d'entre eux: quelle définition du réalisme physique: Locale on non‐locale, présidera à la construction de l'«image du monde», requise par la théorie quantique? (shrink)

RésuméSoixante‐cinq ans après sa publication, la controverse que l'article #Einstein, Podolsky et Rosen suscita à propos de I'image de l'univers physique suggérée par le formalisme de la théorié quantique n'est pas close. Elle oppose une minorité«localiste», petit cercle de physiciens réalistes partisans de la localitéd’ Einstein, á une majorité«non localisten» adepte – non uniformément, cependant – des prédictions non locales de la thhrie quantique et de l'Interprétation dite positiviste de Copenhague érigée principalement sur la philosophie de Bohr et de Heisenberg.Les (...) arguments, les modèles avands par des physiciens de ces deux camps philosophiques et les tests expkrimentaux, passb ou futurs, destinb depuis les InBgalités de Bell à trancher cette controverse sont présidera à la lumière de I'enjeu percu par une minorité d'entre eux: quelle définition du réalisme physique: Locale on non‐locale, présidera à la construction de l'«image du monde», requise par la théorie quantique? (shrink)

This study examines girl child abuse in an internally displaced people's camp in north‐central Nigeria and the response of community health workers. The conflict in Benue State is caused by religious differences between the natives (Tiv people) and the invading Fulani herdsmen. During these conflicts, women and girls were displaced, and they were kept in internally displaced persons (IDPs) located in different parts of the state. Literature has been extensively written on internal displacement in Nigeria, but none has been (...) able to elucidate the health needs of girls and the various abuses girls and women are suffering in IDP camps. In this study, literature was extended (1) to explore the environment of the girl child in IDP camps, (2) to identify reasons for the abuse of the girl child in IDP camps, (3) to investigate the impacts of the abuse on the girl child in IDP camps and (4) to investigate how healthcare workers could be used to alleviate the plight of girl children in IDP camps. This is a qualitative case study, with data obtained from relevant academic literature and personal observation. The data were analysed using content analysis. Findings reveal that the girl child is suffering from psychological, economic and health challenges due to the various forms of abuse they are going through. Following the devastation in Benue State, healthcare workers from the community relocated to neighbouring states. There is a need to recall those healthcare workers and provide them with the necessary materials to assist girls in IDP camps. Recommendations are discussed. (shrink)

Depuis près d'un demi-siècle, Madame Hélène ACKERMANS a coopéré très activement à l'organisation de l'École des sciences philosophiques et religieuses des F.U.S.L. Avec Monseigneur Henri van Camp, elle a donné à la tribune des leçons publiques sa renommée internationale ; auprès de l'actuel comité de direction, elle n'a cessé de prodiguer ses multiples compétences et ses conseils avisés. En hommage à son travail, il a été demandé à quelques-uns des penseurs avec lesquels Madame Hélène ACKERMANS a noué des liens (...) d'amitié, de réfléchir au rôle de la philosophie dans la Cité. (shrink)

In science, models are used in many different ways: to test empirical hypotheses, to help in theory formation, to visualize data, and so on. Scientists construct and study the behavior of models, and compare this to observed behavior of a target system. We propose that for this to be possible models must carry information about their targets. When models are viewed as information carrying entities, this property can be used as a foundation for a representational theory of models. This account (...) presents a way of avoiding the need to refer to modelers’ intentions (or their mental states) as constitutive of the semantics of scientific representations. Moreover, an information theory based account of scientific representations can provide a naturalistic account of models which can deal the problems of asymmetry, relevance and circularity that afflict currently popular proposals based on user intentions. From the information semantic perspective, models as scientific representations can be considered a special case of a larger problem of naturalistic representation. In this paper we will look at what we think is the most promising avenue of developing this information theoretic account of representational models. Traditionally, there has been a strong tendency towards a clear-cut division of labor between philosophers of science and philosophers of mind. We believe that there are some important philosophical insights about representation that are relevant for both camps. (shrink)

Le sacramentalisme qu’on s’accorde, depuis longtemps déjà, à reconnaître comme excessif à la fin du Moyen Âge devait conduire Luther puis les autres Réformateurs à dénoncer la « captivité babylonienne » de l’Eglise, notamment sous l’espèce d’une sorte d’emprisonnement de la « Parole de Dieu » dans l’institution sacramentelle, emprisonnement qui fut analogiquement dénoncé, à l’époque moderne, dans l’institution magistérielle de l’Eglise. Cette opposition entre Parole et Sacrement a en outre connu au XXe siècle une sorte de redoublement avec la (...) dichotomie entre la « foi » et la « religion », dichotomie qui a d’ailleurs traversé aussi bien le camp « catholique » que le camp « protestant », la foi étant mise du côté de la Parole, censée être nécessairement plus « pure » que les sacrements, lesquels relèveraient plutôt de la « religion » avec toutes les ambiguïtés que prend alors le terme devenu proche de la « magie ». La donne ayant aujourd’hui considérablement changé, il semble clair que l’on peut, dans la fidélité à la régulation dogmatique de la foi catholique, penser théologiquement les sacrements dans le sillage direct de la Parole.For a long time an agreement to recognize sacramentalism as excessive at the end of the Middle Ages would lead Luther and the other Reformers to denounce the “Babylonian captivity” of the Church, notably as a kind of imprisonment of the “Word of God” in the sacramental institution, imprisonment that was denounced analogically, in modern times, in the magisterial institution of the Church. This opposition between Word and Sacrament has moreover resurfaced in the 20th century, as a dichotomy between “faith” and “religion.” This dichotomy passed through both the “Catholic” and the “Protestant” camps. Faith was allied with the Word, because it was deemed to be necessarily “purer” than the sacraments, which were more a product of “religion” with all its ambiguities, which then takes on a connotation close to “magic.” Perspectives have considerably changed today, so it seems clear that it is possible to remain faithful to the dogmas of the Catholic faith and theologically view the sacraments as flowing directly from the Word. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 371-397 [Access article in PDF] How the "New Science" of Cannons Shook up the Aristotelian Cosmos Mary J. Henninger-Voss [Figures]Approximately halfway through the "Second Day" of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo's mouthpiece, the mathematician Salviati, scoffs at his Aristotelian colleague Simplicio: "I see that you have hitherto been of that herd who, in order to learn (...) how matters such as this [motion] take place, and in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire to their studies... to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them."1 Silly, simple Simplicio! He has been searching for natural philosophical wisdom in the books of natural philosophers rather than in the world of docks and arsenals. Indeed this quotation appears near the outset of Day Two wherein Salviati offers cannonshot as proof for the opposing Aristotelian position that the experience of projectiles proves the motionless state of the earth. Obviously, if the earth rotates toward the east, cannonballs shot point-blank to the west ought to travel much further than to the east. And clearly this is not so. Simplicio agrees that the new arguments offered by the cannon are excellent, "and now I see with how many elegant experiments nature graciously wishes to aid us in coming to the recognition of the truth," Simplicio enthusiastically enjoins. "What a shame there were no cannons in Aristotle's time!" exclaims the third interlocutor, Sagredo. "With them he would indeed have battered down ignorance, and spoken without [End Page 371] [Begin Page 373] the least hesitation concerning the universe."2 The irony here is not only that Aristotle might have used cannons in order to explain the workings of the universe but also that Galileo does so in the following pages. His demonstrations with reference to artillery demolish the Aristotelian position, but he has had Simplicio open the door for him by recognizing this most violent of artifices as an elegant experiment provided by nature.3The cannon provides a primary referent for Galileo's new mathematical physics of motion from his very first dialogue to his very last. The early De Motu culminated in a series of questions about the shot of cannons, while the conversation in his final masterwork, Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, was set in the Venetian arsenal, and to it Galileo appended a table of the parabolic paths that could be expected from cannons shot at various elevations.4 In some sense Galileo turned inside-out a much older problem, one that had haunted military engineers of sixteenth-century Italy—and Galileo had been trained, and trained others, in military engineering.5 State organizers of war and captain generals were less interested in the implications the arts of fortifications and artillery held for the existing science of natural motion than in the necessity to reduce to a science, that is, a coherent body of knowledge, the rules for manufacturing cannons, planting artillery battery, aiming guns, and fortifying camps, cities, and castles.What Galileo gives us is recognizable as early physics, as a sophisticated mechanical science, a neat triumph of mathematical method in natural philosophy. But the ways and means by which mathematics came together with natural philosophy to address problems of both technology and nature are by no means neat. My claim is that attention to the military sphere will help us sort out some of those ways and means. The curious thing about the historiography on the relationship between early modern science and warfare is that the fact of a connection seems to have been taken for granted, while the implications have seldom been investigated.6 This essay is an attempt to trace those implications by [End Page 373] looking at a mathematician who specifically tried to reduce to a mathematical science the military arts, Niccolò Tartaglia.7 Tartaglia's story shows how the minutia of Aristotelian philosophy was transmuted in early attempts to understand cannonshot... (shrink)

Working at the bedside and within communities as patient advocates, nurses frequently intervene to advance individuals’ health and well-being. However, the International Council of Nurses’ Code of Ethics asserts that nurses should expand beyond the individual model and also promote a rights-enabling environment where respect for human dignity is paramount. This article applies the results of an ethnographic human rights study with displaced populations in Rwanda to argue for a rights-based social advocacy role for nurses. Human rights advocacy strategies include (...) sensitization, participation, protection, good governance, and accountability. By adopting a rights-based approach to advocacy, nurses contribute to health agendas that include more just social relationships, equitable access to opportunities, and health-positive living situations for all persons. (shrink)

Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

This book offers a defence of mathematical fictionalism, according to which we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. Perhaps the most pressing challenge to mathematical fictionalism is the indispensability argument for the truth of our mathematical theories (and therefore for the existence of the mathematical objects posited by those theories). According to this argument, if we have reason to believe anything, we have reason to believe that the claims of our best empirical theories are (at (...) least approximately) true. But since claims whose truth would require the existence of mathematical objects are indispensable in formulating our best empirical theories, it follows that we have good reason to believe in the mathematical objects posited by those mathematical theories used in empirical science, and therefore to believe that the mathematical theories utilized in empirical science are true. Previous responses to the indispensability argument have focused on arguing that mathematical assumptions can be dispensed with in formulating our empirical theories. This book, by contrast, offers an account of the role of mathematics in empirical science according to which the successful use of mathematics in formulating our empirical theories need not rely on the truth of the mathematics utilized. (shrink)

Classical logic has proved inadequate in various areas of computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, philosopy and linguistics. This is an introduction to extensions of first-order logic, based on the principle that many-sorted logic (MSL) provides a unifying framework in which to place, for example, second-order logic, type theory, modal and dynamic logics and MSL itself. The aim is two fold: only one theorem-prover is needed; proofs of the metaproperties of the different existing calculi can be avoided by borrowing them from (...) MSL. To make the book accessible to readers from different disciplines, whilst maintaining precision, the author has supplied detailed step-by-step proofs, avoiding difficult arguments, and continually motivating the material with examples. Consequently this can be used as a reference, for self-teaching or for first-year graduate courses. (shrink)

Entre tradiciones y procesos de transformación, asistimos a una poética del pensar del poema extenso en las Antillas hispanas. Desde la “décima”, venida de Europa, se desarrolla una creatividad lingüística por medio de una apertura pragmática, en estrecha relación con la particularidad colonial: entre mito del progreso y mito de la edad de oro. Para entender la inventiva caribeña, recordamos la práctica del Neobarroco, elaborado a base de las confluencias de lo heterogéneo. Vemos como a través de una heteroglosia discursiva, (...) el poema extenso se asienta en este espacio cultural que son las islas antillanas y subrayamos su papel actual en el relato de historias mínimas que alimentan por otro cariz la historia universal. (shrink)

InWisdom, Information and Wonder, Mary Midgley tackles the question at the root of our civilization: What is knowledge for?

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

What are the driving forces of cultural macroevolution, the evolution of cultural traits that characterize societies or populations? This question has engaged anthropologists for more than a century, with little consensus regarding the answer. We develop and fit autologistic models, built upon both spatial and linguistic neighbor graphs, for 44 cultural traits of 172 societies in the Western North American Indian (WNAI) database. For each trait, we compare models including or excluding one or both neighbor graphs, and for the majority (...) of traits we find strong evidence in favor of a model which uses both spatial and linguistic neighbors to predict a trait’s distribution. Our results run counter to the assertion that cultural trait distributions can be explained largely by the transmission of traits from parent to daughter populations and are thus best analyzed with phylogenies. In contrast, we show that vertical and horizontal transmission pathways can be incorporated in a single model, that both transmission modes may indeed operate on the same trait, and that for most traits in the WNAI database, accounting for only one mode of transmission would result in a loss of information. (shrink)

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

Fundamental principles : the nature of the dispute -- Types of euthanasia -- Psychiatric assisted suicide -- Neonates -- Incompetent adults -- Human life is sacred -- The slippery slope -- Medical views -- Four methods of easing death and their effect on doctors -- Looking further ahead.

"Charming, interesting, thought-provoking and a great read." Rosalind Hursthouse The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered "No!" when his congregation asked him "Is everything in the bible true?", perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this inquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become "one of the sharpest critical pens in the west." This is her remarkable story. Probably the only philosopher to have been in Vienna on the eve of its invasion by (...) Nazi Germany in 1938 and dance in Trafalgar Square on VE day seven year later, she studied philosophy at Oxford in the same year as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, all of whom became close friends. Midgley tells us in vivid and humorous fashion how they cut a swathe through the arid landscape of 1950s British philosophy, writing and arguing - often with each other - about the grand themes of character, beauty and the meaning of rudeness while the spectral figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein hovered in the background. She also charts the highs and lows of philosophy and academia in Britain. On joining the Reading philosophy department on £400 a year in 1949, she doubled its staff complement. But her many years at Newcastle University - where Mike Brearley, who later captained England at cricket, also used to teach - were rewarded with the closure of the philosophy department in the 1980s. The mother of three children, her journey is also one of a woman who in the 1950s and 1960s was fighting to combine a professional career with raising a family. In startling contrast to many of the academic stars of her generation, we learn that Midgley nearly became a novelist and started writing philosophy only when in her fifties, suggesting that Minerva's owl really does fly at dusk. Plainly told like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today. (shrink)

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

This paper criticizes Langton's speech act account of MacKinnon's claim about (the subordinating force of) pornography and offers a different account of how speech might enact harmful norms and thus constitute harm.