Exploring the economic, cultural and political role of slavery in different societies, this volume includes selections from historians, economists and contemporaries - from those enslaved as well as from free members of slave owning societies.

The theme of the third annual Spring workshop of the HUPO-PSI was proteomics and beyond and its underlying goal was to reach beyond the boundaries of the proteomics community to interact with groups working on the similar issues of developing interchange standards and minimal reporting requirements. Significant developments in many of the HUPO-PSI XML interchange formats, minimal reporting requirements and accompanying controlled vocabularies were reported, with many of these now feeding into the broader efforts of the Functional Genomics Experiment data (...) model and Functional Genomics Ontology ontologies. (shrink)

There are nationalisms and nationalisms, and as nationalisms vary from barbarous and murderous to benign and, all things considered, perhaps desirable, so theories of nationalism vary from irrational or turgid metaphysical accounts to reasonable and carefully articulated and argued theories of nationalism. André Van de Putte has well described some of the former while David Miller, Yael Tamir, Geneviève Nootens, Ross Poole, and Robert X. Ware have carefully argued for some modest forms of nationalism, sometimes explicitly and sometimes only (...) by implication. But there are also, as the reader will have seen, forcefully argued and systematic theories setting themselves against even the most sophisticated and plausible defences of nationalism. The articles of Harry Brighouse, Omar Dahbour, and Andrew Levine fall explicitly into that category and, we would argue, so does Allen Buchanan's carefully wrought article, though implicitly and by implication but not by programmatic intent. (shrink)

Contrary to the received opinion that Pablo Picasso conceived of Guernica only after learning of the bombing of the Basque town on 26 April 1937, and in direct response to it, in this article we demonstrate that the mural was visualized much earlier, as part of Picasso’s larger artistic and intellectual response to war. In February 1937 Picasso met with José Luis Sert, the architect of the Spanish Pavilion planned for the Paris World Fair that was to open in June. (...) That he was so quickly able to provide the architect with the exact dimensions of the mural suggests that he had already conceived a vision and plan for the painting that would only later be known as Guernica—a vision that saw him less preoccupied with iconographical minutiae than with visual problem-solving around a general theme: the types and consequences of political violence in Spain and wars past, present, and future. In searching for inspiration, Picasso paid homage to three other artists whose works reflected different aspects of this theme: Francisco Goya, Robert Capa, and David Seymour. The whole mural was painted in black and white because Picasso was certain that Guernica would be seen as a work of photojournalism, which form of journalism had only recently started to be transmitted by wire and radio services. Lastly, Picasso was confident that his painting would eventually be installed in the Prado Museum and be compared to both of Goya’s paintings, The Second of May 1808 (1814) and The Third of May 1808 (1814). To place himself as pre-eminent, Picasso made Guernica larger than either of Goya’s paintings by subsuming the former into a completely original compositional overlay. (shrink)

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

This paper revisits some foundational questions concerning the abstract representation of a discourse context. The context of a conversation is represented by a body of information that is presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation – the information that the speaker presupposes a point at which a speech act is interpreted. This notion is designed to represent both the information on which context-dependent speech acts depend, and the situation that speech acts are designed to affect, and so (...) to be a representation of context that is appropriate for explaining the interaction of context and the contents expressed in them. After reviewing the motivating ideas and the outlines of the apparatus, the paper responds to a criticism of the framework, and considers the way it can help to clarify some phenomena concerning pronouns with indefinite antecedents. (shrink)

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the (...) circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals? perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research. (shrink)

In the Western world it is usually taken as given that we all want happiness, and our educational arrangements tacitly acknowledge this. Happiness, Hope, and Despair argues, however, that education has an important role to play in deepening our understanding of suffering and despair as well as happiness and joy. Education can be uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unsettling; it can lead to greater uncertainty and unhappiness. Drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Paulo Freire, (...) and others, Peter Roberts shows why these features of educational life need not be feared; to the contrary, they can be seen as a source of hope and human fulfilment. After years of negotiating an education system dominated by the language of competition, performance, and economic advancement, students and teachers often long for something different; they seek not just measurable success but also opportunities to ask searching questions of themselves and the world they encounter. Happiness, Hope, and Despair makes an important contribution toward meeting this need. It fosters a rethinking of the nature, purpose, and value of education, and opens up possibilities for further scholarly and professional inquiry. (shrink)

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.