Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory is a valuable survey and critique of research in the rational choice tradition, but one that slights that tradition's past and potential contributions to the study of politics. The authors rightly note limitations of rational choice theory but understate what it has to offer political scientists, for they fail to focus clearly on its essentials; adopt too narrow a basis for evaluating scholarship; and wrongly identify rational choice theory with the shortcomings of some scholarship that (...) makes use of it. (shrink)

A Bazinian commitment to cinematic realism, grounded as it is in the ontology of the photograph, sets up the aesthetic ambition of cinema as irreparably opposed to the structures and ambitions of high modernism ? whether high modernism be taken to have its essence in formal experiment, medium specificity, or negation. Bazin himself licenses such an opposition, but the sense of a divide here is not his alone: there are structural and grammatical reasons why realism (photographic or otherwise) and modernism (...) appear as incompatible. Yet however strong this opposition is ? and however much he himself sometimes endorses it ? Bazin equally offers us resources for closing the gap. In his distinction between aesthetic and psychological realism, his sense of the importance of automatism in cinema's significance, and finally in his insistence that true representation is achieved through poetry, Bazin uncovers a concept of realism as transformative, not transparent, fidelity. This idea of poetic, formalist realism allows for a tentative reconciliation between modernism and realism generally. However, it does so by giving up on a robust idea of photographic transparency as the basis of cinema's power, and thus threatens to efface its specificity as a medium. Stanley Cavell's redescription of medium as automatism helps uncover a Bazinian version of cinematic specificity, one which allows for cinema's appetite for realism without reducing that capacity to a mere inflexible fact of the medium. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed was the first book on cinema to attempt to provide an ontological theorisation of film that could account not only for its popular instances and the reason why they enthralled audiences for over half a century but also for the demise of its mythic function and the possibility of its redemption in serious modernist film. Inadequately understood at the time of its publication, and for too long ignored by Film Studies, Cavell's arguments about modernist (...) cinema all but disappeared in the wake of the rise of postmodern theory. Yet the crisis of belief that confronted modern arts, condemned them to the production of serious works, and eventually unsettled the privileged place of mainstream cinema in twentieth century liberal democracies, still laps at our feet. This essay follows on the back of Kathleen Kelley's recent essay on Cavell, Greenberg, Bazin and medium specificity in film and Robert Sinnerbrink's work aligning Cavell’s understanding of cinema as 'a moving image of skepticism' with the project of thinking philosophically about film. It aims to continue to unpack the idea of automatism as it is conceived by Cavell to operate in film and to argue, along with Kelley and Sinnerbrink, for its importance for understanding the conviction of serious films. (shrink)

_Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory_, a book written by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro and published in 1994, excited much controversy among political scientists and promoted a dialogue among them that was printed in a double issue of the journal Critical Review in 1995. This new book reproduces thirteen essays from the journal written by senior scholars in the field, along with an introduction by the editor of the journal, Jeffrey Friedman, and a rejoinder to the essays by Green and (...) Shapiro. The scholars—who include John Ferejohn, Morris P. Fiorina, Stanley Kelley, Jr., Robert E. Lane, Peter C. Ordeshook, Norman Schofield, and Kenneth A. Shepsle—criticize, agree with, or build on the issues raised by Green and Shapiros critique. Together the essays provide an interesting and accessible way of focusing on competing approaches to the study of politics and the social sciences. (shrink)

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those ...

Stem-cell nomenclature is in a muddle! So-called stem cells may be self-renewing or emergent, oligopotent (uni- and multipotent) or pluri- and totipotent, cells with perpetual embryonic features or cells that have changed irreversibly. Ambiguity probably seeped into stem cells from common usage, flukes in biology's history beginning with Weismann's divide between germ and soma and Haeckel's biogenic law and ending with contemporary issues over the therapeutic efficacy of adult versus embryonic cells. Confusion centers on tissue dynamics, whether stem cells are (...) properly members of emerging or steady-state populations. Clarity might yet be achieved by codifying differences between cells in emergent populations, including embryonic stem and embryonic germ (ES and EG) cells in tissue culture as opposed to self-renewing (SR) cells in steady-state populations. BioEssays 28: 301–308, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Let DDQ be the thesis that definite descriptions are quantifiers. Philosophers often deny DDQ because they believe that quantifiers do not depend on context in certain ways, ways in which definite descriptions do depend on context. In this paper, we examine one such argument, which, if sound, would entail the negation of DDQ.We show that this argument fails, and draw some consequences from its failure.

My purposes in this paper are to explain the constitutive-regulative distinction as set out by Kant in the Dialectic and Methodology, and to note its reappearance in contemporary philosophy.

"This is a timely collection of important papers.

Stanley Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures are, at least in part, an interpretation of the Giffords that came before him. As a contribution to intellectual and theological history, however, I wish Hauerwas had given witness to Santayana's Hermes the hermeneut, along with the considerable, indeed considerate, witness he does give to his own Christian faith. Hauerwas seems to dislike Reinhold Niebuhr and, by my account, misreads William James. Thus I have to conclude that "With the Grain of the Universe" does not (...) measure up to his own more capacious and incisive works. (shrink)

Françoise Baylis’s “aim in writing this book is to improve the ethics literacy and science literacy of those who are keen to reflect on the ethics and governance of deliberately altering the genome...

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 711-712, August 2012.

Volume 25, Issue 5, August 2020, Page 609-612.