How do we prevent the next pandemic? Will governments successfully tackle climate change? Will they find ways to close the gap between the haves and have-nots and to eliminate poverty? Which solution - democratic or authoritarian - will determine the global governance of a flawed nation-state system? This unique contribution to global studies advances a multidisciplinary theory that the governments of all human societies are the tenuous outcome of the competing solutions to the Imperatives of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). (...) The OWL paradigm provides a common framework to evaluate the contrasting responses of the liberal democratic, Chinese, and Russian solutions to global governance. Underscored is the volume's contention that global governance is the overriding issue confronting nation-states and the diverse and divided peoples of what is now a global society for the first time in the evolution of the species. The volume addresses a wide spectrum of audiences, united in their shared resolve that the democracies prevail in a projected century-long struggle between democratic and authoritarian regimes to determine global governance. Scholars, teachers, students, elected officials, policy analysts, media professionals, and engaged citizens who make self-government work will profit from this visionary and provocative study. (shrink)

On 1 July, 1926, Express Wieczorny Ilustrowany [The Illustrated Evening Express] began printing the episodic novel Białe niewolnice [White Female Slaves] by Jan Teodor Grzechota. Twelve days later, the newspaper published an article in which it informed that the printing of the novel was suspended, because the work turned out to be a plagiarism of a novel with the same title by the Scandinavian writer Elizabeth Schoyen. The Jan Teodor Grzechota pseudonym stood for a well-known Łódź-based poet – Mieczysław Braun. (...) The subject of the plagiarism was an extremely popular novel, whose numerous trans- lations appeared in Polish in separate book editions several times in the 1920s and 1930s. The popularity of the motif of human trafficking might have proved itself, as the motif was also used at that time by Polish and European cinematography and theatre. A careful analysis of both works shows that Brown copied the content of Shonyen’s novel almost exactly, i.e. the plot, the characters, and the details. The Polish writer added several initial episodes of the novel in order to set the plot in the reality of Lodz, which was one of the determinants of the poetics of the seg- mental novel. It is probable that the only punishment Braun suffered was public critique of his shameful act, since copyright regulations were not yet in place. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, jak na łódzki folklor miejski i kulturę popularną wpływały głośne zbrodnie dwudziestolecia. Analiza tematu pokazuje, że chętnie sięgano i inspirowano się bieżącymi wydarzeniami, o których pisała łódzka prasa. W ten sposób do drukowanych na łamach miejscowych dzienników powieści popularnych i piosenek śpiewanych na łódzkich podwórkach docierały wątki nawiązujące m.in. do głośnych zbrodni czy skandali obyczajowych. Analiza tekstów piosenek dowodzi, że „przetwarzały” one materiał prasowy, czyniąc go dostępnym nawet dla niepiśmiennych mieszkańców. Omówione piosenki wpisują się w schemat (...) popularnych pieśni nowiniarskich, powtarzając charakterystyczne wzorce konstrukcyjne, sposoby kreacji bohaterów. Kanwą dla wyśpiewywanych treści były przestępstwa, którym towarzyszyły procesy sądowe, szczegółowo relacjonowane na łamach prasy i będące tematem rozmów łodzian. Stąd już tylko krok do tego, by Zajdlowa, Łaniucha czy Ślepy Maks stali się bohaterami piosenek śpiewanych na łódzkich podwórkach. (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

J. Willard Gibbs derived the following equation to quantify the maximum work possible for a chemical reaction$${\text{Maximum work }} = \, - \Delta {\text{G}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} = \, - \left( {\Delta {\text{H}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} {-}{\text{ T}}\Delta {\text{S}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} } \right) {\text{ constant T}},{\text{P}}$$ Maximum work = - Δ G rxn = - Δ H rxn - T Δ S rxn constant T, P ∆Hrxn is the enthalpy change of reaction as measured in a reaction calorimeter and ∆Grxn the change in Gibbs energy as measured, if (...) feasible, in an electrochemical cell by the voltage across the two half-cells. To Gibbs, reaction spontaneity corresponds to negative values of ∆Grxn. But what is T∆Srxn, absolute temperature times the change in entropy? Gibbs stated that this term quantifies the heating/cooling required to maintain constant temperature in an electrochemical cell. Seeking a deeper explanation than this, one involving the behaviors of atoms and molecules that cause these thermodynamic phenomena, I employed an “atoms first” approach to decipher the physical underpinning of T∆Srxn and, in so doing, developed the hypothesis that this term quantifies the change in “structural energy” of the system during a chemical reaction. This hypothesis now challenges me to similarly explain the physical underpinning of the Gibbs–Helmholtz equation$${\text{d}}\left( {\Delta {\text{G}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} } \right)/{\text{dT}} = - \Delta {\text{S}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} \left( {\text{constant P}} \right)$$ d Δ G rxn / dT = - Δ S rxn constant P While this equation illustrates a relationship between ∆Grxn and ∆Srxn, I don’t understand how this is so, especially since orbital electron energies that I hypothesize are responsible for ∆Grxn are not directly involved in the entropy determination of atoms and molecules that are responsible for ∆Srxn. I write this paper to both share my progress and also to seek help from any who can clarify this for me. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We all love with the same part of the body, don’t we?”Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist TheoryYelena Furman (bio)Starting out as a poet who eventually turned to fiction, Iuliia Voznesenskaia was also one of the main figures of the Soviet feminist movement, a fact that makes her biography both unusual and courageous. In the 1970s, Voznesenskaia’s involvement with the dissident movement in Leningrad resulted (...) in several arrests, imprisonment, and time in the camps.1 Although she was not initially interested in women’s issues, her incarceration in all-women’s camps and prisons convinced her that “the situation of women in our country demands special attention” (“Zhenskoe dvizhenie v Rossii” [“The Women’s Movement in Russia”] 41). Along with several other women dissidents, she founded the Soviet feminist movement, putting out the samizdat women’s journal Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), which precipitated immediate reprisals from the KGB. A women’s club, Mariia, and a journal by the same name followed, as did more KGB reprisals. For her feminist activity, Voznesenskaia was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, settling in West Germany.2In 1985, in West Germany, Voznesenskaia wrote her first and best-known novel, Zhenskii Dekameron (The Women’s Decameron). The novel is set in a Leningrad maternity ward containing ten new mothers from different backgrounds with different life experiences: Larisa, Emma, Natasha, Nelia, Galina, and Valentina are educated and all have careers except Galina, whose occupation, admittedly strange for a feminist novel, seems to be a dissident’s wife; Ol’ga works in a shipyard; Irishka is a secretary; Al’bina is an Aeroflot flight attendant doubling as an escort on the KGB’s payroll; Zina is homeless and has served time in the camps; Valentina is a Party worker, whereas Galina is part of the dissident community. Quarantined together for ten days because of a spreading infection and inspired by Emma’s reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the women begin to tell each other stories to pass the time. As its title makes clear, Voznesenskaia’s novel is heavily indebted to Boccaccio’s, borrowing its structure and many of its themes, such as an emphasis on storytelling and sexual explicitness. The humor and poignancy of the women’s stories make it a highly enjoyable read, and the focus on female sexuality and the author’s play with the narrative set this novel apart from other Soviet writers’ works.3 The novel also features what is surely a unique occurrence in Russian and Soviet literature: an openly feminist character (Larisa), referred to by the authornarrator as “zhenshchinoi vpolne emansipirovannoi, mogushchei ukrasit’ soboi liuboe zapadnoe feministicheskoe obshchestvo” [“a completely emancipated woman, capable [End Page 95] of adorning any Western feminist group”] (13), who is moreover depicted in a wholly positive light.4Yet despite enjoying a modicum of success, including being translated into several languages and staged as a play, Zhenskii Dekameron remains an under-read and underrated work.5 The reasons for its relative obscurity are closely allied with Voznesenskaia’s political activities in the 1980s. Exiled abroad for being politically undesirable to Soviet authorities, she could not have her work published in the Soviet Union; rather, the novel came out in Russian in Israel in 1987 (Curtis 186n2).6 The lack of visibility from which she suffered in her native country changed only in the (post)glasnost’ period: in 1991, the novel was published in Russian in Tallinn, and in 1992, in Moscow.7 Despite being able to be published, however, Zhenskii Dekameron seems not to have made a strong impact on either readers or critics, and there does not appear to be any discussion of it in Soviet/ Russian literary journals.The novel likewise suffers from a lack of familiarity in the West. The interest Voznesenskaia generated among Western European and American feminists in the early 1980s was for her feminist activism in the Soviet Union, which preceded her novel writing. Zhenskii Dekameron seems to have made a modest impact on readers; scholars, too, discuss it only occasionally. The most comprehensive treatment of the work to date has been Jerzy Kolodziej... (shrink)

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance (...) of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life. Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, James Behuniak Jr., Steve Bein, Nalini Bhushan, Purushottama Bilimoria, Steven Burik, Amita Chatterjee, Baoyan Cheng, Gordon Davis, Jay L. Garfield, Steven F. Geisz, Peter D. Hershock, Larry A. Hickman, Kathleen M. Higgins, Heidi M. Hurd, Thomas P. Kasulis, Workineh Kelbessa, Lori Keleher, Oliver Leaman, James McRae, Jin Y. Park, James Peterman, Naoko Saito, May Sim, Robert Smid, Paul Standish, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Karsten J. Struhl, Meera Sushila Viswanathan, Wu Shiu- Ching, Xu Di, T. Yamauchi, Yang Liuxin. (shrink)

How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not to do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking (...) about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject. He shows how the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong arises from the value of being related to others in this way, and he shows how familiar moral ideas such as fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism. Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong. (shrink)

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...) matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture. -/- . (shrink)

Synthetic biologists aim to generate biological organisms according to rational design principles. Their work may have many beneficial applications, but it also raises potentially serious ethical concerns. In this article, we consider what attention the discipline demands from bioethicists. We argue that the most important issue for ethicists to examine is the risk that knowledge from synthetic biology will be misused, for example, in biological terrorism or warfare. To adequately address this concern, bioethics will need to broaden its scope, contemplating (...) not just the means by which scientific knowledge is produced, but also what kinds of knowledge should be sought and disseminated. (shrink)

The integration of normative analysis with empirical data often remains unclear despite the availability of many empirical bioethics methodologies. This paper sought bioethics scholars’ experiences and reflections of doing empirical bioethics research to feed these practical insights into the debate on methods. We interviewed twenty-six participants who revealed their process of integrating the normative and the empirical. From the analysis of the data, we first used the themes to identify the methodological content. That is, we show participants’ use of familiar (...) methods explained as “back-and-forth” methods (reflective equilibrium), followed by dialogical methods where collaboration was seen as a better way of doing integration. Thereafter, we highlight methods that were deemed as inherent integration approaches, where the normative and the empirical were intertwined from the start of the research project. Second, we used the themes to express not only how we interpreted what was said but also how things were said. In this, we describe an air of uncertainty and overall vagueness that surrounded the above methods. We conclude that the indeterminacy of integration methods is a double-edged sword. It allows for flexibility but also risks obscuring a lack of understanding of the theoretical-methodological underpinnings of empirical bioethics research methods. (shrink)

Abstract I argue that the two primary motivations in the literature for positing seemings as sui generis mental states are insufficient to motivate this view. Because of this, epistemological views which attempt to put seemings to work don’t go far enough. It would be better to do the same work by appealing to what makes seeming talk true rather than simply appealing to seeming talk. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-12 DOI 10.1007/s11406-012-9363-8 Authors T. Ryan Byerly, Department of Philosophy, Baylor (...) University, Waco, TX, USA Journal Philosophia Online ISSN 1574-9274 Print ISSN 0048-3893. (shrink)

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)