High yielding agriculture in less-industrialized countries, the green revolution, has been both honored and criticized over the past twenty years. Supporters point to the increased food supplies produced with the new practices, but detractors argue that the new technologies are environmentally destructive, unsustainable, and socially inequitable. This paper explores the origins of high yielding agriculture in order better to understand how the arguments over sustainability and equity originated. The Rockefeller Foundation was an important agency in promoting the development of the (...) new agricultural science. Its programs in Mexico and India, initiated in 1941 and 1956, were key building blocks in creating high yielding agricultural practices. The Foundation scientists saw rapid population growth as the main source of hunger and communist subversion. In order to alleviate hunger and instability, they created a strategy of agricultural development based on increased yields but paid no attention to the problem of distribution of harvested food. Sustainability was not recognized as a problem at the time Foundation scientists began their work. Indeed the technical successes of their programs prompted the development of concerns about sustainability. Equity of distribution was brought to the attention of the Foundation before it began its work, but the scientists paid no attention to the issue. (shrink)

Cuba entered a crisis in 1989 when its trading arrangements with the USSR and Eastern Europe collapsed, Their supplies of imported staple food and agricultural input supplies were severely curtailed. Thus the Cubans had to alter both the methods of farming and the mix of items produced. Despite differences in historical setting, the changes forced upon the Cubans are similar to earlier agricultural changes in Mexico and India. Three themes unite events in the countries: (1) National leaders wishing to industrialize (...) their countries found it necessary to have agricultural productivities higher than subsistence levels. (2) Foreign exchange shortages were a major factor in promoting more intensive agriculture, (3) Lack of food self-sufficiency in wartime was a serious threat to a nation's security. Both Mexico and India chose to promote innovations needed for more intensive agriculture, even when this policy conflicted with ideologies and programs of social equality and justice. Current disruptions in the Cuban economy suggest that Cubans, too, will be forced to confront the tension between equity and production in agriculture. (shrink)

One of the most peculiar features of the belief in God is the accompanying claim that God is an indescribable mystery, an object of faith but never an object of knowledge. In certain contexts – in worship, for example – this claim undoubtedly serves a useful purpose; and so I do not want to dismiss the idea altogether. But when pious remarks about the ineffable nature of God are taken out of context and turned into philosophy, the result is usually (...) an epistemological muddle. The trouble, of course, is that those who insist on God's mysteriousness still manage to say all sorts of things about him; he is an incorporeal spirit, he created the world, he loves his creatures, and so on. To assert these things is to presume some understanding of God, but no understanding is possible if God is completely incomprehensible. So if that is how it is, if the object of religious belief is utterly incomprehensible, then it makes no sense to say – or believe – anything about God. (shrink)

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not (...) only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology. (shrink)

Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.

While functioning quite well for many years, the bioethics profession is in crisis. John H. Evans closely examines the history of the bioethics profession, and based on the sociological reasons the profession evolved as it did, proposes a radical solution to the crisis.

Exploring the relationship between morality and professional ideals, Kultgen examines the structure and organization of occupations and the ideals and ideology associated with professions. He argues that professionalization of occupations can both harm and benefit society, and that by converting occupations into organized special interest groups, the professions serve some sectors of society at the expense of others. On the other hand, he highlights the positive points of the professional ideal and explores ways in which it can be used to (...) advance the physical and moral welfare of society. Kultgen also shows how it is the practices within the professions that determine whether rules and ideals are used as masks for self-interest or for genuinely moral purposes. ISBN 0-8122-8094-6: $14.95. (shrink)

The ontology of ‘powerful qualities’ is gaining an increasing amount of attention in the literature on properties. This is the view that the so-called categorical or qualitative properties are identical with ‘dispositional’ properties. The position is associated with C.B. Martin, John Heil, Galen Strawson and Jonathan Jacobs. Robert Schroer ( 2012 ) has recently mounted a number of criticisms against the powerful qualities view as conceived by these main adherents, and has also advanced his own (radically different) version of (...) the view. In this paper I have three main aims: firstly, I shall defend the ontology from his critique, arguing that his criticisms do not damage the position. Secondly, I shall argue that Schroer’s own version of the view is untenable. Thirdly, the paper shall serve to clear up some conceptual confusions that often bedevil the powerful qualities view. (shrink)

The ontology of ‘powerful qualities’ is gaining an increasing amount of attention in the literature on properties. This is the view that the so-called categorical or qualitative properties are identical with ‘dispositional’ properties. The position is associated with C.B. Martin, John Heil, Galen Strawson and Jonathan Jacobs. Robert Schroer ( 2012 ) has recently mounted a number of criticisms against the powerful qualities view as conceived by these main adherents, and has also advanced his own (radically different) version of (...) the view. In this paper I have three main aims: firstly, I shall defend the ontology from his critique, arguing that his criticisms do not damage the position. Secondly, I shall argue that Schroer’s own version of the view is untenable. Thirdly, the paper shall serve to clear up some conceptual confusions that often bedevil the powerful qualities view. (shrink)

Exploring the relationship between morality and professional ideals, Kultgen examines the structure and organization of occupations and the ideals and ideology associated with professions. He argues that professionalization of occupations can both harm and benefit society, and that by converting occupations into organized special interest groups, the professions serve some sectors of society at the expense of others. On the other hand, he highlights the positive points of the professional ideal and explores ways in which it can be used to (...) advance the physical and moral welfare of society. Kultgen also shows how it is the practices within the professions that determine whether rules and ideals are used as masks for self-interest or for genuinely moral purposes. ISBN 0-8122-8094-6: $14.95. (shrink)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-226-97861-3 (alk. paper) — isbn 0-226-97862-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science — Philosophy. 2. Science — History. 3. Progress. I. Title. Q175 .Z25 2004 501 — dc2i 200301 1970 ...

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

Calvin's theology can properly be described primarily as commentary upon Scripture as a whole and secondarily as commentary upon the way the church had read Scripture in its theology and creeds.

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

Bioethicists’ attraction to principlism is rooted in a Western view of how matters that affect the public ought to be deliberated and decided: their resolution ought to be so structured and constrained that it can be understood and verified even by those at a remove from the circumstances of the problem. That view of deliberation, itself fostered by the Western view of government, has encouraged principlism to spread from its source in human subjects research into other areas of bioethics discourse.

This book is a study of comparative philosophy and theology. The themes are the critical issues arising from the modern interpretation of Confucian doctrine as they confront the Christian beliefs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

How can we develop a global economic architecture which is efficient, morally acceptable, geographically inclusive, and sustainable over time? If global capitalism -- arguably the most efficient wealth-creating system known to man -- is to be both economically viable and socially acceptable, each of its four constituent institutions must be both technically competent and buttressed by a strong moral ethos. Leading thinkers in international business and ethics identify the pressing moral issues which global capitalism must answer.

The two theories that revolutionized physics in the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, are full of predictions that defy common sense. Recently, we used three such paradoxical ideas to prove “The Free Will Theorem” (strengthened here), which is the culmination of a series of theorems about quantum mechanics that began in the 1960s. It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if (...) the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. Our argument combines the well-known consequence of relativity theory, that the time order of space-like separated events is not absolute, with the EPR paradox discovered by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935, and the Kochen-Specker Paradox of 1967 (See [2].) We follow Bohm in using a spin version of EPR and Peres in using his set of 33 directions, rather than the original configuration used by Kochen and Specker. More contentiously, the argument also involves the notion of free will, but we postpone further discussion of this to the last section of the article. Note that our proof does not mention “probabilities” or the “states” that determine them, which is.. (shrink)

In this book, John H. Smith investigates the influences of classical and humanistic rhetoric on Hegel's theory and practice of philosophical representation. Smith focuses on Hegel's concept of Bildung (roughly, education, development, or formation) which occupies a central position in his philosophy.