(1974). The American Philosophical Society and the rise of astronomy in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. Annals of Science: Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 407-427.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:BoredomWalter E. BromanBoredom, by Patricia Meyer Spacks; xii & 289 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, $24.95 paper.Scholars who have been immersed in the eighteenth century are often imbued with a penchant for common sense and develop a rich, lucid style. Professor Spacks exemplifies these qualities admirably. In spite of the sludgy title, this is a stimulating and rewarding book. Until now my only thinking about boredom (...) has happened while watching goldfish or cows and wondering if they were slowly perishing of boredom. Otherwise, boredom has been a gray experience accompanying committee meetings or reading insurance prose, but scarcely a matter for philosophy. Professor Spacks shows that there is much here for serious thought. She traces the history of boredom, mainly as manifested in novels. “This book’s project is to investigate boredom’s imaginative functions during the past two and a half centuries, mainly in England, where speakers first labeled the condition early in the second half of the eighteenth century” (p. 6). In this period the idea of boredom was still influenced by Christian thought. Thus, Johnson saw Boswell’s boredom in Scotland as a lapse in Christian morality, a lack of personal resources. Johnson felt the universal power of boredom; it invaded even “the Happy Valley of Rasselas,” but he insisted on the moral duty of opposing it with spirited effort. Women writers of the period are pictured as doing just that—heroically defeating a boredom imposed upon women by society through the vivacity and energy of language in their epistles and narration. Professor Spacks depicts the early nineteenth century as afflicting later decades with sensibility and didactic tedium and developing complex new aspects of boredom as a mode of aggression that could shrivel people, arts, and society. “To real aristocrats belongs the repudiation of feeling—passion and compassion—that constitutes boredom” (p. 201). In the twentieth century boredom becomes ubiquitous and has “enormous and essentially unalterable power” (p. ix). This century is like a fulfillment of Pope’s vision of universal dullness at the end of The Dunciad.During the course of this history we become almost convinced that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women hunkered in a cotton-wrapped male-dominated world which went to great lengths to normalize female boredom. “Often tedium attends compliant virtue” (p. 78). This idea of [End Page 506] oppressed and suffering women is repeated in the text to the point of—well—boring the reader. From my reading in general and from this book I garnered the impression that eighteenth-century women were for the most part tough, alive, and intelligent masters of boredom. I can almost hear their spirits crying, “save the pity!”Professor Spacks fulfills the older mission of criticism to promote interest and attention, and provide insight. Like literature, this mission aims to defeat boredom. We are rewarded with a brilliant discussion of Sense and Sensibility, showing us how Austen’s subtle rhetoric guides the reader’s perception of what is interesting—to learn to find seemingly dull Elinor and Edward actually interesting, to thwart our shallower driftings. In a similar vein with moral bearings Professor Spacks manages to stir interest in a discussion of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy.” We recall how Wordsworth militated against the human inclination to depend upon gross and violent stimulants. He proposed that we ought to be interested in what is moral and thereby genuinely interesting. In “The Idiot Boy” he aimed to enlarge our moral attention span to embrace the lowly and unlikely. I began to feel much less like a moral derelict when Professor Spacks admitted that she too finds “The Idiot Boy” boring.This is such a rewarding book that I feel uncomfortably churlish in pointing out that aspects of the book are irksome. In general, her sentences are beautiful, but in large tracts of the book we find an Emersonian discursiveness where the discussions are crumbly and anfractuous, tacking from this to that. We don’t get enough sustained driving down a clear track. She suggests in passing that Hannah More’s Coelebs is boring to the later nineteenth century when people become more concerned with inner conflicts and... (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Huemer [33] argues against the killing of animals. I offer a critical libertarian analysis of his claim.

The first English translation of Fichte’s second set of 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre.

What is the proper punishment from the perspective of the libertarian philosophy? More specifically, in what way, if at all, may a thief benefit from his robbery? The present essay attempts to wrestle with these challenging questions.

There is a new sheriff in town on the abortion question. It is called evictionism. It diverges, philosophically, from both the pro-life and the pro-choice positions. It assumes that the birth of a human being starts with the fertilized egg but claims that the unwanted baby is a trespasser that may be evicted in the gentlest manner possible.

Heumer and I debate animal rights, utilitarianism, libertarianism, morality and philosophy. We agree that suffering is a problem, and diverge, widely, on how to deal with it. I maintain that this author’s reputation as a libertarian, let alone an intellectual leader of this movement, is problematic. Why? That is because libertarianism, properly understood, is a theory of intra-human rights; this philosophy says nothing about right from an extra-human perspective, Heumer to the contrary notwithstanding. That is to say, he is improperly (...) importing into the freedom philosophy considerations extraneous to it. (shrink)

SummaryThe problems of operations research, optimized at the tactical and strategic level, have a domain of interest much broader than many of its earlier suboptimization problems. Its appeal to scientific method requires the construction of a model from which predictions can be made. This model must have the comprehensive character of those proposed by philosophy and the sciences. Such a model is available in the form of war gaming, a traditional military training vehicle transformed in such a way as to (...) make it a research tool of great power and flexibility and which can assume a multitude of forms. The war game as a new research tool, when applied to the important problems at a high level of optimization, carries with it the excitement of a pioneering venture and the promise of contributions of greatly increased importance to the development of military science. (shrink)

In light of recent advances, I reconsider Jacques Ellul's technological imperative in which he places technology in a broad framework of “technique” (including but not limited to machines) meaning any complex of standardized procedures having absolute efficiency for attaining a predetermined result. He conceptualizes technique as a self-perpetuating, totalizing, and deterministic force inevitably leading to self-destruction if not transcended. Here, I provide support for some of Ellul's claims while addressing some of the important criticisms. I suggest a different kind of (...) imperative that supersedes the technological imperative but does not diminish its importance. The new imperative is hierarchical social structures that now prevail at many levels—from global to local—and that reciprocally relate to many social forces, including technique. Central to the maintaining of social hierarchies are both individual and collective goals and beliefs. I argue the importance of ideology in both science and society, and in technological and hierarchical imperatives. Specifically, I argue the necessity to account for the mutual and reciprocal relationship among beliefs, context, and human attributes to fully comprehend technology and education. (shrink)

Erik Erikson's work in psychosocial developmental theory has made valuable contributions to the field of religious ethics on some very basic issues. This paper makes scattered elements of Erikson's explicit ethical perspective available in concise fashion for critical ethical reflection. It does this in such a way as to highlight the centrally important fact for religious ethics that implicitly operative in Erikson's view is a criterion of "self-transcendence" as definitive of mature personal (fully human, ethical) development.

The defense argument in favor of abortion sees the fetus as an invader, a trespasser, someone against whom violence is justified, since this very young person (the fetus) has initiated violence against his mother. Hewitt [30] rejects this argument. The present paper maintains the justification of this defense argument. My perspective is based on the private property rights of the mother. She owns her person. It is as if her body is her house, and a trespasser has invaded it. Surely, (...) she has the right to evict such a person. This analogy is relatively easy to see in the case of rape. The unwanted fetus, now occupying a part of her body is in effect a intruder. If she really owns her body, which I contend she certainly does, she has a right to expel this person from her property. I also argue that voluntary sexual intercourse does not constitution an “invitation” for the pre-born baby to occupy her premises for nine months. (shrink)