Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined (...) as a compassionate present-with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us-and-them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in-group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co-creating knowledge in perilous times. (shrink)

My chief purpose, in the remaining part of this paper, is to study LAVOISIER'S work upon the Nature of Water in itself and in its bearing on opinion in the eighteenth century: to show how it arose, how it was carried on, how it was published and how it was received.

Developmental perspectives on prejudice provide a fundamental and important key to the puzzle for determining how to address prejudice. Research with historically disadvantaged and advantaged groups in childhood and adolescence reveals the complexity of social cognitive and moral judgments about prejudice, discrimination, bias, and exclusion. Children are aware of status and hierarchies, and often reject the status quo. Intervention, to be effective, must happen early in development, before prejudice and stereotypes are deeply entrenched.

Avery’s et al. ’s 1944 paper provides the first direct evidence of DNA having gene-like properties and marks the beginning of a new phase in early molecular genetics (with a strong focus on chemistry and DNA). The study of its reception shows that on the whole, Avery’s results were immediately appreciated and motivated new research on transformation, the chemical nature of DNA’s biological specificity and bacteria genetics. It shows, too, that initial problems of transferring transformation to other systems and (...) prominent criticism of its results nurtured skepticism. Avery’s experiment was downplayed and neglected particularly by many of those scientists who worked in the new fields of biochemical and biophysical genetics, genetic phage, and TMV research. This was not due to the fact that the implications of the paper could not be connected to generally accepted knowledge. Contrary to a widespread belief, the assumed uniformity of DNA as opposed to proteins was not used as an argument against the validity of Avery’s et al.’s finding. The indifference rather reflected, among other things, the disciplinary gap between the chemically oriented microbiologists and the old and new geneticists who remained committed to genetic and physical methods (in particular x-ray studies) and clung to the assumption that proteins were the sole carriers of biological specificity. The responses to Avery’s et al.’s paper show how different research interests in the areas between microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry interacted with the prejudices, dogmas, individual farsightedness or short-sightedness, and scientific authority during a pivotal period of early molecular biology. (shrink)

German supporters of the Kantian philosophy in the late 19th century took one of two forks in the road: the fork leading to Baden, and the Southwest School of neo-Kantian philosophy, and the fork leading to Marburg, and the Marburg School, founded by Hermann Cohen. Between 1876, when Cohen came to Marburg, and 1918, the year of Cohen's death, Cohen, with his Marburg School, had a profound influence on German academia.

The work of Jacques Derrida is often characterized as anti-scientific, and his philosophy of language taken to mean we are sealed off from empirical reality, confined to our metaphysical prison. This position is reinforced by the fact that his forerunners, Heidegger and Nietzsche, did diminish the importance of the sciences, and argued that we are enclosed within the limits of language. Today, philosophy continues to deconstruct the nature/culture distinction, and challenge the meaning of materialism, but in recent decades has realized (...) that this work requires, in addition to a critique of the modern concept of science, a rehabilitation of the sciences outside their metaphysical definition. The fact that Derrida continues to be understood as an anti-science thinker has led to the exclusion of his work from this project. In this paper, I show that Derrida, while deconstruction the metaphysical concepts of science, nature and empiricism, in fact takes the mathematical sciences as an important force of deconstructing, and develops an interpretation of empiricism that points to a non-metaphysical understanding of it. From this perspective, Derrida's work is useful for thinking through the relation of the human to language and nature in the age of globalization and anthropogenic climate change. (shrink)

Abstract:Although best known to English-speaking readers as the general editor of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the work of French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin is eclectic, encompassing literary studies, ancient philosophy, rhetoric, translation theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. From Presocratic philosophy to more recent reflections on Big Tech and democracy, Cassin's work is rooted in "sophistics," an approach that emphasizes the primacy of language in shaping our interactions with the world. Situating this sophistical approach vis-à-vis classical philology (Bollack) and the (...) philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Derrida), this essay explores the contribution of "sophistical reading" to our understanding of philosophical and literary texts. Showing how Cassin uses rhetorical theory to problematize any simple opposition of the latter, the essay concludes with a critical evaluation of Cassin's reading of Helen, Euripides' most sophistical play. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida's thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, it sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida's response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche's relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, from the relationship between memory and the archive to (...) the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, the book argues that Derrida's writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent 'textualist' reading of Derrida's work, it explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror. (shrink)

When discussing Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy, very little work has been done to offer a developmental account of his systematic views. More often than not, Sellars’s complex views are presented in a systematic and holistic fashion that ignores any periodization of his work. I argue that there is a metaphilosophical shift in Sellars’s early philosophy that results in substantive changes to his conception of language, linguistic rules, and normativity. Specifically, I claim that Sellars’s shift from a formalist metaphilosophy to one (...) more closely aligned with psychology allows for the construction of a normative conception of language. My central claim is that without his abandonment of earlier metaphilosophical commitments, Sellars could not hold what I call an external conception of normativity. It is this move away from a formalist notion of philosophy that allows Sellars to construct a normative picture of language. I conclude that because this substantive shift in philosophical commitments results from changes in Sellars’s metaphilosophical views, there is insight to be found in a meticulous periodization of his work. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, our knowledge of how the human mind and brain works increased dramatically. The field of cognitive science enables us to understand religious traditions, rituals, and visionary experiences in novel ways. This has implications for the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. How people in the ancient Mediterranean world remembered sayings and stories, what they experienced when participating in rituals, how they thought about magic and miracle, and how they felt and (...) reasoned about moral questions--all of that can be now better understood with the help of insights from cognitive science. István Czachesz argues that the field of New Testament Studies witnesses the beginning of a cognitive turn. He surveys relevant developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion and explores the field of cognitive and behavioral sciences in search of opportunities of gaining new insights about biblical materials. Czachesz presents some methodological tools and initial steps, together with a large number of examples of applying the cognitive approach to the New Testament and related ancient literature. (shrink)

The two brothers Julius and Adolf Hurwitz were born in the middle of the nineteenth century in a small town near Hanover (not far from Göttingen). Already during their schooldays, the two of them became acquainted with mathematical problems and both started to study mathematics, but while the younger brother Adolf turned out to be extremely successful in his research, the elder brother and his work seem to be almost forgotten. This paper examines the lives and works of the (...) two brothers with particular emphasis on the contributions of Julius Hurwitz, and the subsequent reception of their research. It deals with the development of an arithmetical theory for complex continued fractions by Julius and Adolf Hurwitz around 1890 and its rediscovery in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article concerns genealogy of ideas from the Marburg school of neo-Kantian philosophy in’s early works in the context of intellectual and educational tendencies in Europe and the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. Yevhen Spektorskyi (1875–1951) is known as a prominent philosopher and lawyer, professor, and the last president at the Saint Volodymyr University. Analyzing his early works, which were strongly connected to his teaching and scientific activities at the law faculty of (...) Warsaw University, the author recognizes several key factors as the reasons for considerable development of the main neo-Kantian ideas of the philosopher. Firstly, Spektorskyi’s research interests were strongly influenced by the intellectual communication with his teacher, professor, and lawyer Oleksandr Blok (1852–1909), whose research was concentrated on the idea of classification of the sciences and its further substantiating. Secondly, we know that at the beginning of 20th century Spektorskyi was on several long-term educational secondments in European educational institutions, which allowed him to immerse into intellectual life of that time. In the article, the author focuses on analysis of Spektorskyi’s published works and unpublished manuscripts of the years 1903–1910. It is clarified that their main issues concern essential notions and arguments of critical idealism and its implications for the procedures of rational argumentation of sciences (mainly, social sciences) by setting ideal goals and clarification of regulative ideas for the social scientists in their research. The article also examines Spektorskyi’s logical structure of critique of the founder of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). The critique concerns the development of ethics as “mathematics of natural science” and argues for the creative and productive rethinking of neo-Kantian ideas by Spektorskyi. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of Galileo's earliest work on free fall, the paper examines the relationship between experiment and theory in his study of motion in the period immediately before and after 1604. The possible role of experiment is assessed in relation to the manuscript evidence and by means of reconstructed experiments.

Classic voltaic batteries of the silver/zinc and copper/zinc types are the ancestors of today's primary cells, and facilitated the development of many aspects of electrical technology. Nevertheless, they appear never to have been studied and evaluated in a quantitative manner, with results recorded in terms of volts, amps, ohms, and watts. Research of this nature is reported here, and has been conducted for the most part with copper/zinc cells. Log–log graphs of voltage versus load and current, and power versus load, (...) are presented for many electrolyte systems. It has been shown that, although the textbook electrolyte of dilute sulphuric acid does work, it is an order of magnitude inferior to a solution containing some additional nitric acid. The latter diminishes the current‐limiting phenomenon of polarization, and was in fact used by Davy, Faraday, and other early investigators. A quantitative consideration of Nicholson and Carlisle's discovery of the electrolysis of water with a silver/zinc voltaic pile is followed by examination of the electrolysis of pure water, trough batteries, and Davy's isolation of potassium and sodium. Every battery gives maximum power when its resistance is adjusted to match the resistance of the load: the maximum output of the ‘Great Battery’ of the Royal Institution is assessed at no more than 3 kW. The paper concludes with a note on the recognized hazard of long‐term exposure to mercury vapour and its possible relevance to the health of Michael Faraday. (shrink)

In his many contributions to the history of science and the history of philosophy, the late Charles Schmitt demonstrated the interdependence of these two spheres of thought in early modern Europe. Schmitt was particularly insistent on a large and positive role for Aristotelian philosophy in the development of early modern science.

In reading the Tractatus, one gets the impression that Wittgenstein, having resolved to his satisfaction the problems about language, logic, science, and mathematics, sets these painstakingly articulated findings in a disproportionately skimpy setting. There is a perfunctory ontology at the beginning, which is highly original as well as austere and perplexing; and at the end he hurries even more than usual through ethics, aesthetics and religion—as if the silence was already coming upon him, prematurely. The Notebooks 1914–1916 help a (...) good deal in understanding this skimpy setting. They give little direct indication of the ontological overture, apart from their frequent reiteration that there must be simples of some sort if the sense of expressions is to be determinate, but they give a fuller treatment to the other topics. This is particularly true of the latter half of 1916, when this parcel of topics seems to have become uppermost in Wittgenstein’s mind. Though it is exceedingly difficult to know what to make of what are in effect discarded notes, some of the entries are just too interesting to ignore. I wish to consider what light they throw on his thought at roughly the Tractatus period, and in particular on the ontology that apparently springs up full grown at the beginning of the Tractatus. (shrink)

This two-volume work examines far-reaching debates on the concept of courage from Greek antiquity to the Christian and mediaeval periods, as well as the modern era. Volume 1 explains how competing accounts of epistêmê, rational wisdom, and truth dominated classical antiquity. Early Christian and mediaeval thinkers, in contrast, favoured fortitude founded on faith and fear of God over philosophical reasoning left to its own devices. Volume 2 turns to theories of courage from the early modern period to the (...) present. It shows how the twin laws of polis and physis are at the heart of post-medieval thought. Courage is found at the crossroads of love and dread, freedom and fate, happiness and suffering, as well as power and submission to the ruling order. The later influence of evolutionism, existentialism, and the social and natural sciences on moral philosophy is also addressed at some length. The protection of people's best interests, the passions and powers of the human will, and the rule of active energy in all aspects of life supplant courage formerly viewed through the lens of reason or faith, or a combination of the two. These new ideas, paradoxically, herald the end of the ethics of courage. They also undermine the courage of ethical thinking. Courage is no longer an end in itself, nor is it a means to happiness "at the end." Regardless of what Gandhi, Tillich, and Foucault have to say about the topic, late modernity and the global age witness a marked loss of interest in courage as an idea worthy of conceptual investigation. Debates about the moral implications of courage give way to the value-free science of resilience, which studies how people can recover from past trauma and find wellness, primarily in the realm of physis. (shrink)

This accessible and practical edition of Kant's best introduction to his own work is designed especially for students. Assuming no prior knowledge of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, esteemed scholar Gunter Zoller provides an extensive introduction that covers Kant's life, the origin and reception of the Prolegomena, the organization of the work, its principal arguments, and its philosophical significance. Detailed notes, a chronology, a glossary, an annotated bibliography, and two reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason--which establishes the specific (...) intellectual background of the Prolegomena--are also included. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to trace the transformations in Nietzsche's early thinking that led to the ideas published in Human, All Too Human, the first book of his mature philosophy. In contrast to his early works, in which he sides with art and philosophy in criticizing the scientific culture of his time, Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, hails the methodology of science as a way to overcome the metaphysical delusions of philosophy, art, and (...) religion. However, in disagreement with popular scholarly view, I show that Human, All Too Human does not represent a complete break with his earlier writings, but rather a shift in emphasis. I argue that the overall project connecting Nietzsche's early thought to Human, All Too Human is, first, the attempt to come to terms with the upheavals introduced into the cultural terrain by the Socratic turn, and second, to affirm a higher culture. (shrink)

This book advances a reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that moves beyond the main interpretative options of the New Wittgenstein debate. It covers Wittgenstein’s approach to language and logic, as well as other areas unduly neglected in the literature, such as his treatment of metaphysics, the natural sciences and value. Tejedor re-contextualises Wittgenstein’s thinking in these areas, plotting its evolution in his diaries, correspondence and pre- Tractatus texts, and developing a fuller picture of its intellectual background. This broadening of the angle (...) of view is central to the interpretative strategy of her book: only by looking at the Tractatus in this richer light can we address the fundamental questions posed by the New Wittgenstein debate – questions concerning the method of the Tractatus , its approach to nonsense and the continuity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Wittgenstein’s early work remains insightful, thought-inspiring and relevant to contemporary philosophy of language and science, metaphysics and ethics. Tejedor’s ground-breaking work ultimately conveys a surprisingly positive message concerning the power for ethical transformation that philosophy can have, when it is understood as an activity aimed at increasing conceptual clarification and awareness. (shrink)

Excerpt from Early Philosophical Works: Translated and Edited by Margaret Jourdain A Complete survey of the life and works of Diderot - whom Voltaire called Pantophile - is not attempted here, for the list of the topics he handled would be a very long one, including as it does various departments of art and science and speculation. The Letter on the Blind (the most interesting of his early works), however, shows him in two lights (...) - as a free-thinker and as one of the long succession of thinkers who prepared the way for the theory of; evolution. The agitation caused by Diderot and his circle about the theory of transformism, it has been said, must have largely contributed to awaken the attention of Erasmus Darwin in England and Lamarck in France to the necessity of throwing more positive light on that great issue. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

RésuméAu tout début du dernier millénaire, Ibn al-Haytham contribua de façon importante à la recherche sur la Voie lactée. Les seuls trois témoins actuellement connus de son traité sur la localisation de la Voie lactée seront ici comparés et discutés. La comparaison entre ces témoins, d'une part et la traduction allemande de ce traité, faite en 1906 par E. Wiedemann, d'autre part, révèle plusieurs différences, ce qui nous a incité à proposer une nouvelle traduction critique du texte transmis. Nous donnons (...) ici un commentaire détaillé de ce traité et nous testons la validité des arguments d'Ibn al-Haytham. Nous discutons aussi ce traité dans le cadre du ‘Grand Débat’ concernant la Voie lactée qui eut lieu autour de 1920, plus d'une décennie après la traduction de Wiedemann. Il nous est apparu que le travail d'Ibn al-Haytham se situe à coup sûr au faîte de la période d'observation, à l’œil nu, de la Voie lactée. S'appuyant sur sa propre argumentation et sur les observations de Ptolémée, Ibn al-Haytham identifie clairement la galaxie comme un corps extra-terrestre, qui n'est pas une partie de l'atmosphère mais qui se situe plus loin que la lune. De plus, à l'occasion des jugements qu'il porte sur les positions stellaires transmises par Ptolémée, Ibn al-Haytham anticipe le concept de mouvements stellaires propres. (shrink)

Understanding social cognition referring to narratives without relying on mindreading skills has been the main aim of the Narrative Practice Hypothesis proposed by Daniel Hutto and Shaun Gallagher. In this paper, I offer a semiotic reformulation of the NPH, expanding the notion of narrative beyond its conventional common-sense understanding and claiming that the kind of social cognition that operates in implicit false belief task competency is developed out of the narrative logic of interaction. I will try to show how experience (...) is shaped through meaning by the structure of narrativity and the way this can account for how narrative competencies do not just depend on language acquisition, but permeate the interactive competencies of pre-linguistic children and some social non-human animals. Developing during primary and secondary intersubjectivity and rooted in the semiotic ability to deceive and manipulate others, semiotic narrativity is the key bridge that leads us to mind and beliefs starting from basic perceptions, emotions and embodied enactive interactions. I will test my Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on Autism spectrum disorders, where social cognition skills don’t work properly, connecting NPSH to the Social Motivation Theory of Autism. I will finally answer some criticisms towards the original NPH, connecting its semiotic reformulation to early mindreading in infants and to some very recent experiments by Krupeneye et al. and Buttelmann et al. about false beliefs understanding in primates. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the interaction between science, philosophy and politics (including ideology) in the early work of J. B. S. Haldane (from 1922 to 1937). This period is particularly important, not only because it is the period of Haldane's most significant biological work (both in biochemistry and genetics), but also because it is during this period that his philosophical and political views underwent their most significant transformation. His philosophical stance first changed from a radical organicism to a position (...) far more compatible with mechanical materialism. The primary intellectual influence that was responsible for this shift was that of F. G. Hopkins. Later, Haldane came to accept Marxism and its official metaphysics, dialectical materialism, a move that let him accept the materialist conception of the world while still maintaining a resolute distance from mechanism. Throughout all these changes, what is most obvious is the influence of science on Haldane's philosophical views. An influence in the opposite direction is far less apparent. (shrink)

The question of when and how the basic concepts that characterize modern science arose in Western Europe has long been central to the history of science. This book examines the transition from Renaissance engineering and philosophy of nature to classical mechanics oriented on the central concept of velocity. For this new edition, the authors include a new discussion of the doctrine of proportions, an analysis of the role of traditional statics in the construction of Descartes' impact rules, and (...) go deeper into the debate between Descartes and Hobbes on the explanation of refraction. They also provide significant new material on the early development of Galileo's work on mechanics and the law of fall. (shrink)

Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science invites readers to join in up-to-the-minute conceptual discussions of the fundamental issues, problems, and opportunities in cognitive science. Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field, this vivid and engaging introductory text relates the story of the search for a cognitive scientific understanding of mind. This search is presented as a no-holds-barred journey from early work in artificial intelligence, through connectionist (artificial neural network) counter-visions, and (...) on to neuroscience, artificial life, dynamics, and robotics. The journey ends with some wide-ranging and provocative speculation about the complex coadaptive dance between mind, culture, and technology. Each chapter opens with a brief sketch of a major research tradition or perspective, followed by short yet substantial critical discussions dealing with key topics and problems. Ranging across both standard philosophical territory and the landscape of cutting-edge cognitive science, Clark highlights challenging issues in an effort to engage readers in active debate. Topics covered include mental causation; machine intelligence; the nature and status of folk psychology; the hardware/software distinction; emergence; relations between life and mind; the nature of perception, cognition, and action; and the continuity (or otherwise) of high-level human intelligence with other forms of adaptive response. Numerous illustrations, text boxes, and extensive suggestions for further reading enhance the text's utility. Helpful appendices provide background information on dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, consciousness, and more. An exceptional text for introductory and more advanced courses in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, Mindware is also essential reading for anyone interested in these fascinating and ever-changing fields. (shrink)

The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social (...) worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the situated narrative choreographies in which they are enrolled are essential for their political effects. In our case, we show how these biosocial narratives have been articulated with knowledge and practices from restorative justice and trauma-informed care to reimagine the social meaning of the biology of early life adversity. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is widely recognized as belonging among the greatest and most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth-century – and arguably the greatest British moral philosopher of the late twentieth-century. His various contributions over a period of nearly half a century changed the course of the subject and challenged many of its deepest assumptions and prejudices. There are, nevertheless, a number of respects in which the interpretation of his work is neither easy nor straightforward. One reason for this is that (...) both his views and his methods evolved and shifted in significant ways, especially around the time that he wrote and published Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (i.e. the early 1980s). One way of gauging and assessing these changes in Williams’ views and outlook is to consider his relationship and attitude to other philosophers during this period. Of particular interest is his changing attitude to the moral philosophy of David Hume. This relationship is of considerable importance, not only because it serves as a useful tool for the interpretation of Williams’ views but also because it provides us with some critical insight into the respective strengths and weaknesses of both Hume’s and Williams’ contributions. -/- . (shrink)

This groundbreaking volume casts light on the long shadow of naturalistic monism in modern thought and culture. When monism's philosophical proposition - the unity of all matter and thought in a single, universal substance - fused with scientific empiricism and Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, it led to the formation of a powerful worldview articulated in the work of figures such as Ernst Haeckel. The compelling essays collected here, written by leading international scholars, investigate the articulation of monism in (...) class='Hi'>science, philosophy, and religion and its impact on a range of social movements, from socialism and early feminism to imperialism and eugenics. The result is a broad and comprehensive chronological, disciplinary, and geographic map of a century of monism, as well as a bellwether for innovative new directions in the interdisciplinary study of science, religion, philosophy, and culture. (shrink)

Edinburgh has long been recognized as one important place where early glacial theory was promoted and debated. This paper, rather than attend to the longer-term development of glacial theory, focuses on the ways in which the theory was assessed, disseminated and received in and through the scientific culture of early Victorian Edinburgh. Edinburgh's scientific and educational societies, science journals, newspapers and field sites are brought to view through examining their engagement with, and use of, early glacial (...) theory. Tracking the theory's passage across a range of spaces bound up with the promotion of geology in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh signals relations between local geological endeavour and other sorts of scientific and cultural work. Particular, though not exclusive, attention is given to practices more readily defined as ‘popular’. (shrink)

Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links (...) these depictions to adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1963), The Damned (1963), and Lord of the Flies (1963), will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’. (shrink)

This edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes works by more than thirty authors. There is a particular emphasis on the sophists, with the inclusion of all of their significant surviving texts, and the works of Alcidamas, Antisthenes and the 'Old Oligarch' are also represented. In addition there are excerpts from early poets such as Homer, Hesiod and Solon, the three great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, medical (...) writers and presocratic philosophers. Besides political theory, areas represented include early anthropology, sociology, ethics and rhetoric, and the wide range of issues discussed includes human nature, the origin of human society, the origin of law, the nature of justice, the forms of good government, the distribution of wealth, and the distribution of power among genders and social classes. (shrink)

This is the sequel to Logic. A disciplined mind is one of the most conspicuously missing things in our society. This book can help alleviate that malady. The subtitle of this book is, "Communication of useful knowledge in religion, in the sciences, and in common life." This is a lithograph of an 1833 edition printed in London which also contains "A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth.".

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Positivism has had a tremendous impact on the development of the social sciences over the past two centuries. It has deeply influenced method and theory, and has seeped deeply into our broader understandings of the nature of the social sciences. Postmodernism has attempted to loosen the grip of positivism on our thinking, and while it has not been without its successes, postmodernism has worked more to deconstruct positivism than to construct something new in its place. Psychologists today perennially wrestle to (...) find and retain their intellectual balance within the methodological, theoretical, and epistemological struggles between positivism and postmodernism. In the process, pre-postmodern criticisms of positivism have been largely forgotten. Although they remain deeply buried at the core of psychology, these early alternatives to positivism are rarely given explicit hearing today. The current piece explores some of the early critiques of positivism, particularly of its scientism, as well as early suggestions to tip the scales in favor ofsapientia. This third option, largely overlooked within mainstream psychology, is of tremendous value today as it is both deconstructive and constructive relative to the shortcomings of positivism. It avoids the overly reductionistic “trivial order” of positivism, as well as the deeply unsatisfying and disorienting “barbaric vagueness” of postmodernism, while simultaneously embracing important core elements of both currents of thought. (shrink)

This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

Excerpt from Custom an Essay on Social Codes Still a professor extraordinarius and thus not en cumbered with the time-consuming duties of an Ordinarius (a full professor), T onnies was living in the small town of Eutin, about an hour's ride on the train to Kiel, the seat of his university, and engaged in a prolific literary and scholarly pro duction on a great variety of theoretical as well as practical sociological, political and economic prob lems. Most of his articles (...) were intended for an edu cated though not professional public of people in terested in fundamental questions of social life or in social problems of the day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

James Harrington (1611-77) was a pioneer in applying the methods of Machiavelli and other civic humanists to English political society and its landed structure. In the century after his death, his ideas were adapted to become an important ingredient in the vocabulary of both English and American political opposition to the methods of Hanoverian parliamentary monarchy. There has been no complete edition of Harrington's writings since 1771, or of Oceana, his best-known work, since 1924. This is a modernised edition, and (...) includes all of his prose works on political subjects. The critical introduction attempts to revalue the evidence concerning Harrington's life and writings, to locate them in the context of Civil War, Commonwealth and Puritan thinking and to trace the development of Harringtonian and neo-Harringtonian ideology during subsequent generations. (shrink)

Iberian repertorios de los tiempos stemmed from Medieval almanacs and calendars. During the sixteenth century significant editorial, conceptual and material changes in repertorios incorporated astronomy, geography, chronology and natural philosophy. From De Li’s Repertorio (1492) to Zamorano’s Cronología (1585), the genre evolved from simple almanacs to more complex cosmological works which circulated throughout the Iberian-American world. This article claims that repertorios are a form of syncretic knowledge rather than “popular science” by relying on the concept of “knowledge in (...) transit”. Elaborating on this perspective, I present how repertorios ended up delivering a worldview from existing materials, a fact so far unnoticed by scholarship. At the same time, repertorios should not be considered an exclusively Iberian phenomenon, but the full scope of their nature as a form of syncretic knowledge should include their networks with migrants, indigenous, mestizos, and criollos across the Atlantic. In this sense, I try to trace the paths connecting productions in the Americas with Iberian repertorios. (shrink)

Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating (...) their stories with firsthand observation, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural historians built a nascent science of the sea. In its close focus on “sea beans” and “barnacle geese,” subjects of wide conjecture and earnest curiosity, the essay shows how shallow waters welcomed new actors onto the scientific stage and decentered the geographies of knowledge production, thereby advancing contemporary knowledge of oceanic circulation as well as the taxonomies and ecologies of coastal creatures. (shrink)

This paper examines the early years of decision making in the award of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, and shows how the prize became a tool in the boundary work which upheld the social demarcations between scientists and inventors, as well as promoting a particular normative view of individual scientific achievement. The Nobel committees were charged with rewarding scientific achievements that benefited humankind: their interpretation of that criterion, however, turned in the first instance on their assessment of (...) the groundbreaking nature of the ‘science’, with the applied or practical ‘benefits’ of that discovery being treated as very much secondary factors in the award. Through an interrogation of the reports sent by the committees to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, this paper shows how committee members depended on a notion of ‘post-dated utilitarianism’ in reconciling potential tension between rewarding basic and applied science, and explores the ways in which the annual prize both shaped, and was shaped by, media perceptions of scientific virtue. (shrink)

The experience of uncertainties in exploring the unknown—and dealing with them—is a key characteristic of what it means to be a life science researcher, but we have only started to understand how this characteristic shapes cultures of knowledge production, particularly in times when other—more social—uncertainties enter the field. Although the lab studies tradition has explored the workings of epistemic uncertainties, the range of potent uncertainty experiences in research cultures has been broadened within the neoliberal reorganization of academic institutions. Most (...) importantly, the stronger dependency on competitive project funding has led to increased social uncertainties. Being employed part-time and for shorter periods of time, researchers often find themselves in the precarious situation of high employment uncertainty. This article argues that the currently predominant form of organizing academic research creates a structural link between epistemic and social uncertainties. It then describes empirically different modes of coping with these uncertainties that researchers deploy and that seem to have become a variable in the governance of research cultures. To do so, it takes the academic life sciences in Austria as an example and explores them using approaches from both science and technology studies and labor studies. (shrink)

Background While it is generally acknowledged that self-prescribing among physicians poses some risk, research finds such behaviour to be common and in certain cases accepted by the medical community. Largely absent from the literature is knowledge about other activities doctors perform for their own medical care or for the informal treatment of family and friends. This study examined the variety, frequency and association of behaviours doctors report providing informally. Informal care included prescriptions, as well as any other type of personal (...) medical treatment (eg, monitoring chronic or serious conditions). Method A survey was sent to 2500 randomly-selected physicians in Colorado, 600 individuals returned questionnaires with usable data. The authors hypothesised: (1) physicians would prescribe the same types of treatment at home as they prescribed professionally; and (2) physicians who informally prescribed addictive medications would be more likely to engage in other types of informal medical care. Results Physicians who wrote prescriptions for antibiotics, psychotropics and opioids at work were more likely to prescribe these medications at home. Those prescribing addictive drugs outside of the office treated more serious illnesses in emergency situations, more chronic conditions and more major medical/surgical conditions informally than did those not routinely prescribing addictive medications. Physicians reported a variety of informal care behaviour and high frequency of informal care to family and friends. Discussion The frequency and variety of informal care reported in this study strongly argues for profession-wide discussion about ethical and guideline considerations for such behaviour. These areas are discussed in the paper. (shrink)