The United States leads the world in incarceration, and the United Kingdom is persistently one of the European countries with the highest per capita rates of imprisonment. Yet despite its increasing visibility as a social issue, mass incarceration - and its inconsistency with core democratic ideals - rarely surfaces in contemporary Anglo-American political theory. Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration seeks to overcome this puzzling disconnect by deepening the dialogue between democratic theory and punishment policy. This collection of original essays initiates (...) a multi-disciplinary discussion among philosophers, political theorists, and criminologists regarding ways in which contemporary democratic theory might begin to think beyond mass incarceration. Rather than viewing punishment as a natural reaction to crime and imprisonment as a sensible outgrowth of this reaction, the volume argues that crime and punishment are institutions that reveal unmet demands for public oversight and democratic influence. Chapters explore theoretical paths towards de-carceration and alternatives to prison, suggest ways in which democratic theory can strengthen recent reform movements, and offer creative alternatives to mass incarceration. Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration offers guideposts for critical thinking about incarceration, examining ways to rebuild crime control institutions and create a healthier, more just society. (shrink)

This topically organized, interdisciplinary anthology provides competing perspective on the claim that western culture faces a moral crisis. Using clearly written, accessible essays by well-known authors in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, the book introduces students to a variety of perspectives on the current cultural debate about values that percolates beneath the surface of most of our social and political controversies.

The United Nations' designation of 1979 as the International Year of the Child marked the first global effort undertaken to heighten awareness of the special needs of children. Activities initiated during this special year were designed to promote purposive and collaborative actions for the benefit of children throughout the world. Michigan State University's celebration of the International Year of the Child was held from Septem ber 1979 through June 1980. A variety of activities focused attention on the multiplicity of factors (...) affecting the welfare of today's children as well as the children of the future. Many people involved with the university were concerned that benefits to children continue beyond the official time allocated to the celebration. The series Child Nurturance is one response to this concern. The first five volumes of Child Nurturance reflect directly the activities held on the Michigan State University campus and consist of original contributions from guest speakers and invited contributors. Subsequent biennial volumes will present original contributions from individuals representing such fields as anthropology, biology, education, human ecology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and medicine. We hope the material presented in these volumes will promote greater understanding of children and encourage interdisciplinary inquiry into the individual, family, societal and cultural variables which influence their welfare and development. We would. like to express both our thanks and our admiration for who not only typed the camera-ready copy for each of Margaret Burritt the volumes, but also served as general manager of the entire project. (shrink)

Zen Masters of China presents more than 300 traditional Zen stories and koans, far more than any other collection. Retelling them in their proper place in Zen's historical journey, it also tells a larger story: how, in taking the first step east from India to China, Buddhism began to be Zen. The stories of Zen are unlike any other writing, religious or otherwise. Used for centuries by Zen teachers as aids to bring about or deepen the experience of awakening, they (...) have a freshness that goes way beyond religious practice and a mystery and authenticity that appeal to a wide range of readers. The author himself was drawn to Zen through the stories and has been collecting them for forty years. He began this book because he was curious about the relationships between the people you read about in the stories: they are historical figures, masters and students in Zen's long passage from India to China and on to Japan. He realized that, placed in chronological order, the stories tell the story of Zen itself, how it traveled from West to East but also how it was transformed in that journey, from an Indian practice to something different in China (Ch'an) and then more different still in Japan (Zen). The fact that its transmission was so human, from teacher to student in a long chain from West to East, meant that the cultures it passed through inevitably changed it. Zen Masters of China is first and foremost a collection of mind-bending Zen stories and their wisdom. More than that, without academic pretensions or baggage, it recounts the genealogy of Zen Buddhism in China and, through the stories themselves, illuminates how Zen became what it is today. (shrink)

This anthology is remarkable not only for the selections themselves, among which the Schelling and the Heidegger essays were translated especially for this volume, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part (...) of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one-shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

The avocado (Persea americana) is a major crop commodity worldwide. Moreover, avocado, a paleopolyploid, is an evolutionary “outpost” among flowering plants, representing a basal lineage (the magnoliid clade) near the origin of the flowering plants themselves. Following centuries of selective breeding, avocado germplasm has been characterized at the level of microsatellite and RFLP markers. Nonetheless, little is known beyond these general diversity estimates, and much work remains to be done to develop avocado as a major subtropical‐zone crop. Among the goals (...) of avocado improvement are to develop varieties with fruit that will “store” better on the tree, show uniform ripening and have better post‐harvest storage. Avocado transcriptome sequencing, genome mapping and partial genomic sequencing will represent a major step toward the goal of sequencing the entire avocado genome, which is expected to aid in improving avocado varieties and production, as well as understanding the evolution of flowers from non‐flowering seed plants (gymnosperms). Additionally, continued evolutionary and other comparative studies of flower and fruit development in different avocado strains can be accomplished at the gene expression level, including in comparison with avocado relatives, and these should provide important insights into the genetic regulation of fruit development in basal angiosperms. BioEssays 30:386–396, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non-semantically-balanced) corpora.

Participants were asked to draw inferences about correlation from single x,y observations. In Experiment 1 statistically sophisticated participants were given the univariate characteristics of distributions of x and y and asked to infer whether a single x, y observation came from a correlated or an uncorrelated population. In Experiment 2, students with a variety of statistical backgrounds assigned posterior probabilities to five possible populations based on single x, y observations, again given knowledge of the univariate statistics. In Experiment 3, statistically (...) naïve participants were given a problem analogous to that given in Experiment 1, framed verbally. Experiment 4 replicated Experiment 3 but added an “impossible to determine” response option. Models that rely on computing sample correlations make no predictions about these investigations. From a Bayesian perspective, participants’ inferences in all four experiments tended to make probabilistically valid inferences as long as the single datum was directional. The results are discussed in light of the Brunswikian notion of vicarious functioning. (shrink)

Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of human expression leaves a number of central issues unclear – not least, whether the lack of expression in nonhuman species is attributable to their lack of the relevant metarepresentational abilities, an absence of trust, or a consequence of other factors. In place of their view, we propose a gradualistic account of the origins of human expression.

This paper clarifies the usage of Albert Hirschman’s categories of market behaviour as of exit and voice in debates about workplace democracy by taking seriously his critique of the neoclassical analysis of competition. Pro-market liberals are generally hostile to the idea of workplace democracy and tend to favour top-down hierarchies as a way of organising labour. This hostility is generally inspired by the neoclassical analysis of exploitation and efficiency, which leads them to defend distributions achieved through exit-based competitive equilibria. (...) Following Hirschman, I propose to consider a hypothetical alternative: a democratic equilibrium, reached through the use of voice. I show that it would present the same appealing characteristics than its competitive counterpart while also accounting for the non-ideal conditions in which markets operate. Support for free markets should entail support for workplace democracy minimally understood as a strengthening of voice. (shrink)

À propos du livre récent de Marlène Albert Llorca, Les Vierges miraculeuses, l’auteur survole rapidement les conclusions de recherches récentes sur l’image religieuse dans l’Europe traditionnelle. Il examine les manières dont les dévots convertissent des images en objets cultuels en les associant à des laïcs importants et aux sanctuaires qui les accueillent. Il commente les conclusions d’Albert Llorca selon lesquelles ces images, vêtues pour la circonstance, peuvent servir à répliquer le “miracle” originel pour les dévots qui manipulent ces (...) vêtements ; ainsi se rejouent les événements miraculeux censés être à l’origine du charisme de l’image. C’est donc l’imaginaire de la communauté, incarné dans les “cameraras” qui habillent l’image, qui dote celle-ci de pouvoirs miraculeux. (shrink)

humanism /'hju:menizm/ n. an outlook or system of thought concerned with human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, and Gloria Steinem all declared themselves humanists. What is humanism and why does it matter? Is there any doctrine every humanist must hold? If it rejects religion, what does it offer in its place? Have the twentieth century's crimes against humanity spelled the end for humanism? On Humanism is a timely and powerfully argued (...) philosophical defence of humanism. It is also an impassioned plea that we turn to ourselves, not religion, if we want to answer Socrates' age-old question: what is the best kind of life to lead? Although humanism has much in common with science, Richard Norman shows that it is far from a denial of the more mysterious, fragile side of being human. He deals with big questions such as the environment, Darwinism and 'creation science', euthanasia and abortion, and then argues that it is ultimately through the human capacity for art, literature and the imagination that humanism is a powerful alternative to religious belief. Drawing on a varied range of examples from Aristotle to Primo Levi and the novels of Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift, On Humanism is a lucid and much needed reflection on this much talked about but little understood phenomenon. (shrink)

In his clear-sighted, humane, and provocative way, Richard Falk calls for a revolution in thinking about the future of world order. Explorations at the Edge of Time develops the idea that a major cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism is under way, creating both new difficulties and new opportunities in the domain of global public policy. The author observes, "A postmodem possibility implies the human capacity to transcend the violence, poverty, ecological decay, oppression, injustice, and secularism of the modern (...) world." Recognizing that the concepts of "progress" and "development" have changed due to the breakdown of the modernist consensus, Falk contends that most problems have transnational dimensions. He proposes a commitment to grassroots globalism, and he challenges aspiring "citizen pilgrims" to think and act in ways that will enhance their feeling of identity with the rest of creation. Falk's "rooted utopianism" challenges our political imagination in relation to pressing global problems and helps forge an overall vision of the future. What is at stake is the building of political understanding amidst the appreciation of unity and diversity for a hopeful entry upon the 21st Century. Author note: Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University. He has published more than twenty books, including The Promise of World Order (Temple). (shrink)

Raymond Aron's vision of liberalism reflects the paradox that ideologies both fuel and restrict democratic debate. This may be related to the history of French liberalism developed by Albert Thibaudet in the inter-war period. This article considers Aron's use of Thibaudet's ideas in his wartime writings. It suggests that these represented a significant step forward from his pre-war approach to pluralism and set certain parameters for his post-war political thought. It is also suggested that Thibaudet's writings led Aron to (...) study the ideas of the nineteenth-century intellectual Ernest Renan. These contributed to his understanding of international relations. While Aron was to lose interest in Renan and Thibaudet, his wartime debt to them represents an important stage in his intellectual evolution and ties him to a distinctively French (if little known) tradition of pluralist thought. (shrink)

In one of his notebooks, Albert Camus describes, The stranger, The myth of Sisyphus, Caligula and The misunderstanding as pertaining to a series; a schema that suggests that if one were to write about one of these literary works, one would be writing about parts of a whole unless one also engaged with the others. Whether one does this or not, may or may not reflect the nature of the relationship one sees these texts as sharing. The stranger and (...) The myth of Sisyphus share something unique: they are both as Camus describes them, zero points; a zero point here being understood as the zero point at which one thinks about one’s existence. This article begins with a reflection upon the relative philosophical value of understanding The myth of Sisyphus as a work of art and then occupies itself with how this understanding might provide an opportunity for self-reflection when reading The stranger. The reading of The myth of Sisyphus is not used so much to better understand Meursault and his story but to invert our interpretative methodology such that it is possible to speak to the reader as a significant actor. The novel is thought of in terms of the gifting of a philosophical problem, a problem which the author of this article attempts to understand from the point of view of how one might see oneself as paradoxically implicated in the drama of its articulation. It is this paradox that will lead us to speak of the narrative of The stranger as referring to a problem in how philosophy speaks to our experience of education. (shrink)

I argue that Berkeley's distinctive idealism/immaterialism can't support his view that objects of sense, immediately or mediately perceived, are causally inert. (The Passivity of Ideas thesis or PI) Neither appeal to ordinary perception, nor traditional arguments, for example, that causal connections are necessary, and we can't perceive such connections, are helpful. More likely it is theological concerns,e.g., how to have second causes if God upholds by continuously creating the world, that's in the background. This puts Berkeley closer to Malebranche than (...) to Hume. -/- As far the what I call the "first strategy;" defending the passivity of ideas by ordinary introspection, I refer to the work of the French psychologist Albert Michotte,(1940) and those now extending his experiments, to show that (1) there is an immediate and quite robust visual impression of causality, (admitted in fact by Berkeley, Malebranche and Hume) and (2) of more importance, the impression isn't due to projecting into nature expectations gained from experienced regularities. (shrink)

This important new study is an intellectual history exploring the reception of Darwinism by prominent German socialist theoriests: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engles, Friedrich Albert Lange, Ludwig B chner, August Bebel, Karl Katusky, and Eduard Bernstein. It relies not only on published books, articles, and speeches by these men, but also on some unpublished correspondence. In addition, one chapter covers the anti-socialist stance of prominent Darwinian biologists, including Charles Darwin and the foremost champion of Darwinism in Germany, Ernst Haeckel. Darwinism's (...) effect on German socialism's view of eugenics, race and religion are also discussed. (shrink)

During the First World War, Bertrand Russell was political commentator for _The Tribunal_, the official weekly publication of the No-Conscription Fellowship, of which Russell was Action Chairman. This volume contains many short papers from that period, which reflect Russell's immediate reponses to developments in the conflict. These documents bear witness to Russell's growing commitment to pacifism, and reveal the development of the patterns of political argument, rhetoric and activism which were to characterise his work throughout his life.

A central ethical and political worry in Heidegger and Nietzsche is the philosophical irrelevance of everyday moral, epistemological and political norms, as well as of individual suffering and evil. In consequence they offer little to help us think about ethical experience. I argue that Albert Camus' analysis of moral and epistemic limits offers a more fruitful alternative. But this requires us to take ordinary experience as central to philosophical analysis, rather than simply viewing it as a clue to the (...) real philosophical issues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: * 1 Science and Scientists in Conflict – the Case of Bohr and Heisenberg * 2 Professional/Personal Ethics in a Time Of War – Meitner, Einstein, Compton, and Wilson * 3 An Existential Experience: The Epiphany of the First Atomic Bomb Test * References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary (...) Mullis on the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

While different groups of viewers may have sought different values in Cézanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete" artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities of his materialistic, industrialized society.1 He was (...) seen as an isolated man who lived apart from other painters and found human relationship and communication difficult. Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which made Cézanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Fénéon found it appropriate to refer to "the Cézanne tradition," a designation which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the artist promulgated by Gauguin and his associates.2 Gauguin had painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of 1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial, and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described Cézanne as embodying the mysticism of the Orient.3 Such a characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the experience of the mystical, the transcendental, the intensely real. For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic understanding of their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal principles. They were Christians who could not see the truth of Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany; they were refined painters of nature who could not see the expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by a broad outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cézanne, living in isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Provence, qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a primitive artist. · 1. For Cézanne as "incomplete," see, e.g. Thadée Natanson, "Paul Cézanne." Revue blanche 9 , p. 496; and Gustave Geoffrey, "Paul Cézanne" , in La Vie artistique , p. 218. For Cézanne as "primitive," see, e.g., Georges Lecomte, L'Arte impressionniste , pp. 30-31; and Maurice Denis, "Cézanne" , in Théories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 2d ed. , p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the earlier stages of development of various Western styles , provincial or uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. , pp. 483-88; and Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle méthode de critique" , "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" , and "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" , in Oeuvres posthumes , pp. 202, 216, 262-63.· 2. Félix Fénéon, "Paul Gauguin" , in Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. , 1:192.· 3. Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue , p. 45. Félix Fénéon, André Mellerio, and Emile Bernard also associated Cézanne's style with mysticism. Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written a related article, "The End of Impressionism: A Study of Theories of Artistic Expression". His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)