This work approaches international law as more than merely information contained in international legal norms, & does not view international law as a body of ...

The first part of this paper consists of an exposition of the views expressed by Pierre Duhem in his Aim and Structure of Physical Theory concerning the philosophy and historiography of mathematics. The second part provides a critique of these views, pointing to the conclusion that they are in need of reformulation. In the concluding third part, it is suggested that a number of the most important claims made by Duhem concerning physical theory, e.g., those relating to the Newtonian method, (...) the limited falsifiability of theories, and the restricted role of logic, can be meaningfully applied to mathematics. (shrink)

Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism contains ten new essays by leading and rising scholars from the United States, Europe, and Asia who explore the historical development and conceptual contours of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy.

Astronomers of the first half of the nineteenth century viewed our solar system entirely differently from the way twentieth-century astronomers viewed it. In the earlier period the dominant image was of a set of planets and moons, both of which kinds of bodies were inhabited by intelligent beings comparable to humans. By the early twentieth century, science had driven these beings from every planet in our system except the Earth, leaving our solar system as more or less desolate regions for (...) the most part bereft of intelligent life. This essay traces this extinction and its relation to religious thought, noting the role played in it by Sir John Herschel and especially by William Whewell. The inverse square laws for gravitation, heat radiation, and light receive special attention, as does the question of the relevance of the Christian notions of a divine incarnation and redemption. (shrink)

From antiquity to the present, humans have debated whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. This presentation will survey this debate, examining the roles played in it by science, religion, philosophy, and other areas of human learning. One thesis that will be developed is that whether or not extraterrestrials exist, ideas about them have strongly influenced Western thought.

L A Selby-Bigge’s British Moralists was first published in 1897 and for over sixty years has proved an invaluable instrument in the teaching of moral philosophy in the English-speaking world. It has been out of print for a number of years. This new presentation by the Professor of Political and Social Philosophy in the University of Glasgow is most opportune.

As its title suggests, this book is a discussion of ‘three starting-points, three different ways of throwing light on what ethics is all about’ ; it asks the question: Is ethics basically love, law or language? The first chapter, ‘Ethics as Love’, looks critically at what is generally identified as the situationist approach—‘All you need is love’. The New Testament insistence upon the primacy of love over law is well-known; but this must be balanced by appreciation of the fact that (...) the law in question is the ceremonial law—Christ nowhere sets aside the moral law in favour of love. There remains the question of the status of moral rules; are they absolute or are they simply convenient rules of thumb suffering exceptions? The criticism of the latter view is searching without presenting anything novel. What is love? How does one know that an action is a loving action? To understand the meaning of love one must have experience—love is that kind of term. A consequence is that, even if we cannot positively describe all that is in love, we need at least to be able to state what love is not ‘however open-ended the term may otherwise be’. Love must exclude certain kinds of behaviour if it is to have any meaning; can sexual perversion or the killing of babies ever be an expression of love? On the other hand the word love is a ‘growing’ word and if its meaning occasionally outstrips semantic rules there must remain what the author calls a ‘revolutionary continuity between what love now means for us and what it used to mean’. Again, the idea of ‘situation’ is a good deal more complex than situationist theories sometimes allow. It is something more than the personal face-to-face encounter and must take in much wider fields of human relationship. Furthermore the individual usually finds himself in a number of overlapping situations the demands of which will frequently conflict. All this is well said; and it needs to be said, for situationism of the ‘only love counts’ variety is more prone than most theories to be content with re-assertion instead of meeting telling criticism. (shrink)

This interesting study in religious sociology takes as its subject the various attitudes of society towards death. These attitudes are reflected in the mass-media of communication. Ten daily news papers published in Paris in a given week in 1969 were systematically studied for references to death; likewise the 399 films shown in Paris-cinemas during 1968, the television programmes for the first six-months of 1969 and the popular songs broadcast from two selected radio stations. The result is found in three long (...) chapters. The first is devoted to violent death—murders, suicides, deaths in traffic accidents, etc. The second chapter takes up the more subjective attitudes in the face of death—scientific detachment, fear, horror, black humour. And the third chapter documents the commercial and business aspects of death—the economics of the pompes funébres. (shrink)

In 1995 Walker & Company published a small book authored by the professional writer Dava Sobel entitled Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Not only did the book sell exceptionally well; it also spawned a three‐hour film, Longitude, starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, and a new, lavishly illustrated work, The Illustrated Longitude, by Sobel and Harvard's William J. H. Andrewes. It is difficult to think of another book in (...) the history of science that has attained comparable success. Yet it seems that history of science journals have taken scant notice of the book; my efforts to locate reviews of Sobel's volume in history of science journals have turned up only a single review, that being in Italian. This is all the more distressing because the book and film present a very controversial view of Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. This is not the place to examine Sobel's recipe for success, but it seems relevant background in reviewing a book also written by a professional journalist, also published by Walker, and fairly comparable in format to Sobel's.The history of science is rich in fascinating stories that could delight a variety of readers. The story of the search for longitude in the eighteenth century is certainly one of these; the dramatic quest to discover Neptune in the mid nineteenth century is another. Put overly briefly, the latter is the story of the frustrated efforts of a young, personally diffident but intellectually bold Cambridge graduate, John Couch Adams, to convince either the director of the Cambridge Observatory or England's Astronomer Royal to look for a planet that Adams's calculations had told him must be located at a specific position. It is also the story of the brilliant and arrogant Urbain J. J. Leverrier, who had independently completed comparable calculations and who beat Adams to the discovery by persuading not one of his French colleagues but an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory to launch a search, which within a few hours had located Neptune. It is also the story of the immense controversy that followed and that has in the last few years been given a new twist with the recovery of key documents carried off to Chile from the Royal Greenwich Observatory.Tom Standage, science correspondent for the Economist and author of The Victorian Internet, has taken up the challenge of retelling the Neptune story, which had previously been treated in dozens of articles and in book‐length studies by John Pringle Nichol, Albert Glodin, Morton Grosser, and Patrick Moore. Moreover, Standage presents the Neptune narrative as the centerpiece in a story that stretches from William Herschel's discovery of Uranus to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 and even to the spectroscopic detection in the last few years of dozens of extra–solar system planets. Standage's clear and engaging prose is based on extensive reading in English and French sources, some manuscript work, and interviews with a number of the discoverers of extra–solar system planets. Although the book is bereft of footnotes, an annotated bibliography at its end partially fulfills their function. Numerous illustrations appear, but these tend to be rather dark and small.Although the book is generally reliable, some significant errors appear. For example, whereas Standage reports that William Herschel did not see Uranus alter in size, Herschel observed its diameter nearly double in the two months after his first observation of it. It is John, not William, Herschel who is buried in Westminster Abbey. Benjamin Peirce's last name is misspelled , as is Christiaan Huygens's first name , and it is incorrect to say that Huygens “considered it was unlikely that there was life elsewhere in the solar system” . Also, because Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher played such a major role in the discovery of the planet Pluto by creating and directing the research program that enabled a recent high school graduate, Clyde Tombaugh, to be the first to recognize the planet on a photographic plate, it seems inappropriate that Standage makes no mention of Slipher in recounting the discovery of Pluto.Overall this is a highly engaging story, well told and based on good sources. One would hope that it may follow Longitude into film, at least a documentary, and that other authors and publishers will recognize the market for such exciting stories from the history of science. (shrink)

Few will deny that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the best-known work on moral philosophy. It is a well-trodden field for the commentator. Indeed one occasionally has the feeling that it is the very proliferation of commentary that makes further guidance necessary and justifies a new commentator. But one hastens to add that the author of the present volume does very much more than simply sort out the differences between the interpretations offered by his predecessors in the field. That not unimportant (...) task he does very skilfully. But his main preoccupation is ‘to give an account of Aristotle’s main ethical doctrines, and to justify interpretations by the detailed scrutiny of particular passages, often very familiar passages’. He goes on to remark that in the study of Aristotle familiarity can be an obstacle to understanding. (shrink)

Few will deny that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the best-known work on moral philosophy. It is a well-trodden field for the commentator. Indeed one occasionally has the feeling that it is the very proliferation of commentary that makes further guidance necessary and justifies a new commentator. But one hastens to add that the author of the present volume does very much more than simply sort out the differences between the interpretations offered by his predecessors in the field. That not unimportant (...) task he does very skilfully. But his main preoccupation is ‘to give an account of Aristotle’s main ethical doctrines, and to justify interpretations by the detailed scrutiny of particular passages, often very familiar passages’. He goes on to remark that in the study of Aristotle familiarity can be an obstacle to understanding. (shrink)

This volume is the first of a new series, ‘Traditio Christiana, Texts and Commentary on Patristic Theology’. The aim is to print the outstanding patristic texts, in their original Latin or Greek, on a given topic and to accompany them with translation and commentary. The specialist and the layman are thus put in a position of having direct contact with the sources of Church teaching. The aim is ecumenical, too; for here is common ground between the various confessions.

This volume is the first of a new series, ‘Traditio Christiana, Texts and Commentary on Patristic Theology’. The aim is to print the outstanding patristic texts, in their original Latin or Greek, on a given topic and to accompany them with translation and commentary. The specialist and the layman are thus put in a position of having direct contact with the sources of Church teaching. The aim is ecumenical, too; for here is common ground between the various confessions.