This article examines a series of Schelling-like models of residential segregation, in which agents prefer to be in the minority. We demonstrate that as long as agents care about the characteristics of their wider community, they tend to end up in a segregated state. We then investigate the process that causes this and conclude that the result hinges on the similarity of informational states among agents of the same type. This is quite different from Schelling-like behavior and suggests that segregation (...) is an instance of macrobehavior that can arise from a wide variety of micromotives. (shrink)

Rawls famously argues that the parties in the original position would agree upon the two principles of justice. Among other things, these principles guarantee equal political liberty—that is, democracy—as a requirement of justice. We argue on the contrary that the parties have reason to reject this requirement. As we show, by Rawls’ own lights, the parties would be greatly concerned to mitigate existential risk. But it is doubtful whether democracy always minimizes such risk. Indeed, no one currently knows which political (...) systems would. Consequently, the parties—and we ourselves—have reason to reject democracy as a requirement of justice in favor of political experimentalism, a general approach to political justice which rules in at least some non-democratic political systems which might minimize existential risk. (shrink)

‘‘Undone science’’ refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction (...) and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ‘‘new political sociology of science.’’. (shrink)

In Gibbons 2006, I presented a counterexample to epistemic internalism, the view that justification supervenes on the internal. Andrew Moon has replied to this paper, asking what generates the intuition behind the counterexample. In this note, I try to answer that question.

Combat deployments put health care providers in ethically compromising and morally challenging situations. A sample of recently deployed nurses and physicians provided narratives that were analyzed to better appreciate individual perceptions of moral dilemmas that arise in combat. Specific questions to be answered by this inquiry are: 1) How do combat deployed nurses and physicians make sense of morally injurious traumatic exposures? and 2) What are the possible psychosocial consequences of these and other deployment stressors? This narrative inquiry involves analysis (...) of ten deployed military nurses’ and physicians’ aversive or traumatic experiences. Burke’s dramatist pentad is used for structural narrative analysis of stories that confirm and illuminate the impact of war zone events such as betrayal, disproportionate violence, incidents involving civilians, and within-rank violence on military health care provider narrators. Results indicate cognitive dissonance and psychosocial sequelae related to moral and psychological stressors faced by military medical personnel. Discussion addresses where healing efforts should be focused. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay is speculative in character. It is the work of a historian who has completed a study, written on certain principles, of the first three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and does not intend to advance to a similar study of the second three. He does, however, believe that such a study would differ profoundly from that he has constructed of the first trilogy and wishes to offer hypotheses as to why this should (...) be so. All hypotheses invite falsification, and he will make statements about the second trilogy and its hypothetical construction which invite research with results to which they may or may not stand up. To do this will be an exercise in the history of historiography, a sub-discipline still in progress of establishing itself. It will also give the author the opportunity of extending certain generalizations he was led to advance in writing and completing his study of Gibbon’s first trilogy, and of enquiring whether they remain valid in the light of a study of the second – given that this study is still at a hypothetical stage. (shrink)

Before Edward Gibbon began his history of the Christian empire, he ended the first volume of the “Decline and Fall” with two chapters on the rise of Christianity before Constantine. These were believed to deny or ignore its character as revelation. It was also pointed out that this purpose was irrelevant to the history he had set out to write. The church historians he read focussed on the interactions between the Christian gospel and Hellenic philosophy. Gibbon, however, chose (...) to emphasize the Christian rejection of cultic polytheism, and gave a Humean account of the early Christians as enthusiasts. Five years elapsed between the first and second volumes of his history. By the latter date his reputation as an unbeliever was established, and has since received more attention than the history he wrote. (shrink)

Do researchers produce scientific and technical knowledge differently than they did ten years ago? What will scientific research look like ten years from now? Addressing such questions means looking at science from a dynamic systems perspective. Two recent books about the social system of science, by Ziman and by Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott, and Trow, accept this challenge and argue that the research enterprise is changing. This article uses bibliometric data to examine the extent and nature of changes identified (...) by these authors, taking as an example British research. We use their theoretical frameworks to investigate five characteristics of research said to be increasingly pervasive—namely, application, interdisciplinarity, networking, internationalization, and concentration of resources. Results indicate that research may be becoming more interdisciplinary and that research is increasingly conducted more in networks, both domestic and international; but the data are more ambiguous regarding application and concentration. (shrink)

Gibbon was a far more subtle, serious and empathetic historian of the triumph of Christianity than his reputation as a sneering infidel historian implies, or so argues Liebert in this short and wel...

Barbarism and Religion - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the idea of 'The Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. Professor (...) Pocock argues that the English Enlightenment of which Gibbon was part was an ecclesiastical as well as a secular phenomenon, one of several Protestant Enlightenments distinct from that of the Parisian philosophes, and part of the reconstitution of Europe after the wars against Louis XIV. The whole sequence is concerned less with the specific historiography of the Roman Empire than with the cultural history of Europe in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- INTRODUCTION -- VOLTAIRE -- HUME -- ROBERTSON -- GIBBON -- INDEX.

ABSTRACTThe Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but to imagine what Gibbon would have said (...) of Ibn Khaldun and to understand each the better by doing so; in particular, to show how the former would have responded to the latter as he has become known to us since the twentieth century. (shrink)

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his vague and multifarious reading could not teach me to think, to write, or to act; and the only principle, that darted a ray of light into the indigested (...) chaos, was an early and rational application of the order of time and place. The maps of Cellarius and Wells imprinted in my mind the picture of ancient geography: from Stranchius I imbibed the elements of chronology: the Tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the Annals of Usher [ sic ] and Prideaux, distinguished the connection of events. . . This seems a fairly direct comment on Gibbon's attitude to geography as a historian in that it is confirmed by various of his working documents and commonplace book comments not aimed at posterity and by the practice embodied in his great work that was thus targeted, the Decline and Fall. Taking Gibbon's private documents, the first manuscript we have in his English Essays, for example, is a tabulated chronology from circa 1751 when Gibbon was fourteen years old, which begins with the creation of the world in 6000 BC and runs up to 1590 BC, this being exactly the sort of material which could be commonplaced from the likes of Ussher and Prideaux. Matching this attention to chronology is a concern with geography, and indeed the two are coupled together as in his comment in the Memoirs. Thus in his Index Expurgatoris, Gibbon berates Sallust as “no very correct historian” on the grounds that his chronology is not credible and that “notwithstanding his laboured description of Africa, nothing can be more confused than his Geography without either division of provinces or fixing of towns”. In this regard, Gibbon the author of the Decline and Fall was a “correct” historian, in that he was careful to frame each arena in which historical events were narrated in the light of a prefatory description of the geography of the location under discussion. This is most readily apparent in the second half of the opening chapter of the work, where Gibbon proceeds on what his “Table of Contents” calls a “View of the Provinces of the Roman Empire”, starting in the West with Spain and then proceeding clockwise to reach Africa on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, a pattern of geographical description directly mirroring ancient practice in Strabo's Geography and Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis. But this practice of prefacing a historical account with geographical description repeats itself at various points in the work, as when, approaching the end of his grand narrative, Gibbon reaches the impact of “Mahomet, with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other” on “the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire”. Before discussing the birth of Islam, Gibbon treats his readers to a discussion of the geography of Arabia, beginning with its size and shape before moving on to its soils, climate and physical–geographic subdivisions. (shrink)

In this research, the -dimensional variable-coefficient Caudrey–Dodd–Gibbon–Kotera–Sawada model used in soliton hypothesis and implemented by operating the Hirota bilinear scheme is studied. A few modern exact analytical outcomes containing interaction between a lump-two kink soliton, interaction between two-lump, the interaction between two-lump soliton, lump-periodic, and lump-three kink outcomes for the -D VC Caudrey–Dodd–Gibbon–Kotera–Sawada equation by Maple Symbolic packages are obtained. By employing Hirota’s bilinear technique, the extended soliton solutions according to bilinear frame equation are received. For this model, (...) the contemplated model can be got by multi-D binary Bell polynomials. In addition, the analytical analysis of the high-order soliton outcomes to present the discipline of outcomes. The effect of the free parameters on the behavior of acquired figures of a few obtained solutions for the nonlinear rational exact cases was also discussed. The above technique could also be employed to get exact solutions for other nonlinear models in physics, applied mathematics, and engineering. (shrink)

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with (...) the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’. However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts. (shrink)

Anyone interested in the relationship between culture and the intellectual life, has no doubt turned to the works of Christopher Dawson. This collection of ten essays from a recent conference at Oxford acts as an excellent commentary on Dawson’s main academic concerns: recovering history as a philosophical-theological category, and the reintegration of the disciplines so as to provide future generations with an understanding of culture in the truest sense of the term. As John Morrill points out in his introductory essay, (...) Dawson’s “passionate commitment to metahistory and his proclamation of the deeply moral purpose of the historian” —although out of favor in some academic circles—marks his as a unique voice in the search for truth. Dawson’s daughter, Christina Scott, offers the reader some otherwise inaccessible insights into her father’s life, especially regarding his early interest in Augustine’s De civitate Dei and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Aidan Nichols, OP provides a bigger picture. His essay, “Christopher Dawson’s Catholic Setting,” highlights the “theology of culture” affecting all parts of English life during the earlier part of this century: the literature, art, architecture, and philosophy that brought “a Catholic sensibility to bear on cultural life”. The Chelsea set, a vibrantly orthodox Catholic salon to which Dawson belonged, centered their thought around the Neo-Thomism of Gilson and Maritain, the literature of Fumet and Julian Green, as well as the social thought of Emmanuel Mounier. (shrink)

The study of historiography is undergoing a revolution akin to that which took place in the history of political thought in the 1960s, and the work of J.G.A. Pocock is central to both. Pocock's continuing exploration, in Barbarism and Religion (1999-), of the intellectual contexts of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is central to this enterprise, and this essay situates the origins of his own work within a pre-‘Cambridge School’ Cambridge and its experience (...) of what might be called the Butterfieldian moment. That was marked by a desire to treat religion seriously as a driving force in history; and the same concern is applied here to further understanding an eighteenth-century controversy in which history and religion were dramatically involved, and which profoundly affected Gibbon's own historical and religious views. The work of Conyers Middleton and John Jortin is critically examined from this perspective. These preludes to Gibbon lead to a series of postludes examining the particular contexts in which Victorian and twentieth-century historians and writers, from Henry Hart Milman to Evelyn Waugh, variously appreciated and interpreted Gibbon. The whole is to be seen as a reflexive engagement with Pocock's vitally illuminating studies in eighteenth-century historiography. ☆ A slightly revised version of a lecture given at the University of Sussex on 22nd May 2008, on the occasion of a colloquium devoted to J.G.A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion. It had originally acted as a prelude to a lecture by Pocock on the same occasion, subsequently published as ‘Gibbon and the invention of Gibbon: chapters 15 and 16 reconsidered’, History of European Ideas 35 (2009), 209–16. In this sense, therefore, the present essay has become a postlude. I am deeply grateful to Noël Sugimura for generously reading and commenting on the rescoring of a lecture into an essay. (shrink)

Justo Lipsio publicó en 1598 la primera ed. de _Admiranda sive de magnitudine romana libri IV_, una de las fuentes bibliográficas del _Decline and Fall_ de Gibbon. El trabajo presenta las relaciones entre ambos proyectos historiográficos y revisa el análisis que de esa relación realizó J. G. A. Pococken _Barbarism and Religion. __Volume Three. The First Decline and Fall_ (2003).

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts (...) for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

Traditional definitions of determinism in terms of causation seem nowadays to have been largely superseded by accounts in terms of predictability. If it were true that all and only caused events were predictable then doctrines of universal causation and universal predictability would be equivalent and it would only remain to ask what advantages if any an indirect epistemological account had over a direct ontological one—none, one might have thought, more especially if the former presupposed the latter. In fact, however, the (...) two are by no means so simply and directly related: being caused is neither alone sufficient nor yet again is it necessary for predictability, or so at least I shall be endeavouring here to show. (shrink)

The present ERP study investigated effects of subliminal emotional words on preference judgments about subsequent visual target stimuli . Each target was preceded by a masked 17-ms emotional adjective. Four classes of prime words were distinguished according to the combinations of positive/negative valence and high/low arousal. Targets were liked significantly more after positive-arousing primes , relative to negative-arousing , positive-nonarousing , and negative-nonarousing primes . In the target ERP, amplitude of right-hemisphere positive slow wave was increased after positive-arousing compared to (...) negative-arousing primes. Evaluative priming effects on judgments and ERPs were more pronounced in high state-anxious participants. The results suggest that there is indeed affective/semantic processing of unconscious words, evaluative priming operates relatively late during target processing, to be effective, prime words need to score high on the arousal dimension, and individual differences in state anxiety modulate the susceptibility to subliminal evaluative priming. (shrink)

Legal responses to battered women who kill have long animated scholarly debate and law reform activity. In September 2012 after 47 years of alleged abuse, Frenchwoman Jacqueline Sauvage fatally shot her abusive husband three times in the back. The subsequent contested trial, conviction for murder, unsuccessful appeal and later presidential pardon of Sauvage thrust the French law of self-defence into the spotlight. The Sauvage case raises important questions surrounding the adequacy of the French criminal law in this area, the ongoing (...) proliferation of gendered stereotypes in law and the need for reform. In the wake of the Sauvage case, this article provides a timely analysis of the gendered law of self-defence in France. Drawing from an in-depth analysis of the judgments imposed in the Sauvage case, this article examines the adequacy of French legal responses to battered women who kill and ignites an argument for further law reform. (shrink)

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.