One of the main features of the contemporary environmental crisis is that no one has a clear picture of what is taking place. Environmental problems are real enough but they bring home the inadequacy of our knowledge. How does the natural world relate to the social world? Why do we continue to have such a poor understanding? How can ecological knowledge be made to relate to our understanding of human society? Reconstructing Nature argues that the division of labor is a (...) key but neglected factor underlying people's inability to adequately understand and relate to the natural world. The argument extends Marx's theory of alienation to account for inadequate knowledge and therefore inadequate concern for nature. Using recent developments in "critical realist" philosophy, the book aims to find ways of reorganizing knowledge in the light of ecological consciousness. It also corrects the emphasis of much environmental literature by focusing on production rather than consumption. (shrink)

There is a natural objection to the epistemic coherence of Bas van Fraassen’s use of a distinction between the observable and unobservable in his constructive empiricism, an objection that has been raised with particular clarity by Alan Musgrave. We outline Musgrave’s objection, and then consider how one might interpret and evaluate van Fraassen’s response. According to the constructive empiricist, observability for us is measured with respect to the epistemic limits of human beings qua measuring devices, limitations ‘which will be described (...) in detail in the final physics and biology’ (van Fraassen 1980: 17). In order for the constructive empiricist to determine what counts as observable, he will have to appeal to our best scientific theories of light, human physiology, and so forth. To put the same point in a slightly more abstract way, in order to draw a distinction between observable and unobservable entities, the constructive empiricist needs to use his best scientific theory of observability – call it T* – to tell him the identity of the observable entities. This raises an interesting difficulty. Constructive empiricism is the view that ‘science aims to give us theories that are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate’ (van Fraassen 1980:12). When he accepts a theory, the constructive empiricist only believes the statements of his scientific theories that are about observable entities. Thus, in order to know which statements of a scientific theory to believe, the constructive empiricist needs to know which statements of that theory are about observable entities. In particular then, the constructive empiricist only believes the statements of his theory of observability T* that are about observable entities. Therefore, in order to know which statements of T* he can believe, the constructive empiricist needs to know which statements of T* are about observable entities. However, it is T* that tells the constructive empiricist what counts as an observable entity: the constructive empiricist therefore needs to use T* to tell him which statements of T* he can believe. The fact that the distinction drawn by T* must also apply to itself is not an immediate cause for alarm.. (shrink)

The social sciences have paid little sustained attention to society’s relations with the universe. This paper attempts to redress this failure, arguing that human beings have been increasingly alienated from the cosmos. This estrangement is a product of three closely related processes. These are the division between mental and manual labour in master–slave societies, the strengthening of abstraction due to the market, and the tendency of human beings to dichotomize a world they do not understand or experience as threatening. Alienation (...) from the cosmos is a dominant feature of all master–slave societies but it has been made an ingrained, all-pervasive feature of capitalism. Contemporary liberation theology, pre-figured by movements such as the peasant revolts of the fifteenth century and the Diggers of the seventeenth century, have attempted to resist this alienation, making new ‘heavens on earth’. Alternative cosmologies are also being made by scientists that describe the cosmos in forms that can be recognized by lay people. Critical realism, by revealing the links between dominant classes, infantilized cosmologies and human subjectivities, aids the emergence of these contestations and alternatives. (shrink)

"Marxism and the Underdog" is an impressive paper. It usefully outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist perspective on animals. As the paper rightly suggests, much of Marx's own work was predicated on the opposition between humans and animals other than humans. Yet, as the paper also points out, many of his concepts and critiques are useful for addressing contemporary concerns. Among the most important recent examples is Benton's critique of liberal and individualist "animal rights." It is a perspective (...) on Marx and his assertion that much human rights discourse offers little or no fundamental challenge to the patterns of economic, social, and political power that pervade capitalist society. There is little point in allocating rights to humans if the kind of society in which they live systematically denies the realization of these rights. I mention Benton here because his important perspective on animal rights is not fully explained in the paper under review here. (shrink)

Demands by Patients or their Families for treatment thought to be inappropriate by health care providers constitute an important set of moral problems in clinical practice. A variety of approaches to such cases have been described in the literature, including medical futility, standard of care and negotiation. Medical futility fails because it confounds morally distinct cases: demand for an ineffective treatment and demand for an effective treatment that supports a controversial end (e.g., permanent unconsciousness). Medical futility is not necessary in (...) the first case and is harmful in the second. Ineffective treatment falls outside the standard of care, and thus health care workers have no obligation to provide it. Demands for treatment that supports controversial ends are difficult cases best addressed through open communication, negotiation and the use of conflict-resolution techniques. Institutions should ensure that fair and unambiguous procedures for dealing with such cases are laid out in policy statements. (shrink)

In this journal, Peter Lipton and I discussed Musgrave's objection that the constructive empiricist cannot consistently maintain his own distinction between the observable and the unobservable, and van Fraassen's initial reply. We considered several possible interpretations of van Fraassen, and expressed misgivings about each. Muller and van Fraassen have consequently clarified the official constructive empiricist response to Musgrave, although some issues still remain.According to Muller and van Fraassen, Musgrave's objection assumes that constructive empiricism is to be understood in line (...) with a syntactic account of our scientific theories – whereby a theory consists of a set of sentences formulated in some suitable language – whereas constructive empiricism has always been wedded to an explicitly semantic account of our scientific theories, which understands a scientific theory in terms of a class of models. Once this oversight is amended, the objection is seen to be toothless. As Muller and van Fraassen write: " Indeed, the only proper response, and the one that turns the table on Musgrave and his followers, is to argue that his incoherence argument does not work in the context of the semantic view as here elaborated, while the bad consequence he draws is an inevitable corollary to the older view within which he presents it. "The force of Musgrave's objection therefore turns on nothing more than implicitly saddling the constructive empiricist with an independently problematic account of what a scientific theory is.This move should cause some surprise however, for Musgrave's objection – albeit usually presented in conjunction with an explicitly syntactic construal of our scientific theories – is in fact quite neutral between these competing accounts. As Musgrave originally put it, in order for the constructive empiricist to draw his distinction between observable and unobservable …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ Introduction“Between the Bible and the Philosophers”: ShakespearePeter Atterton (bio) and Sean Lawrence (bio)It is not clear when Levinas first read Shakespeare, but we do have some clues. The first complete translation of Shakespeare’s works into Russian, Levinas’s mother tongue, appeared between 1865 and 1868. These volumes doubtless graced the shelves of his family’s bookstore in Kovno (now Kaunas), in Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. Kovno served (...) as capital of one of three губернии gubernias (provinces), but also as the de facto center of Lithuanian intellectual life. The family bookstore catered to the highbrow tastes of government officials and served the needs of teachers and students at the local lycée. One also imagines that it fired the literary imagination of the young Levinas, who taught himself to read Russian at a young age. However, it would have been highly unusual for one so young, even for one as precocious as Levinas, to have read Shakespeare recreationally and self-educationally during this period (1906–1915). It probably was not until he entered the lycée in Kharkov, in Tsarist Ukraine, where his family emigrated at the beginning the Great War, or after his family’s return in 1920 to Lithuania, where Levinas attended the Hebrew lycée in Kovno, that Levinas read Shakespeare for the first time. We know that Russian gymnasiums and technical schools assigned Shakespeare.1 His gymnasium education, between the ages of eleven and seventeen, is therefore the latest point by which Levinas could have read Shakespeare for the first time, though we do not know what or how much.He certainly acknowledged Shakespeare’s influence on his early thought. In an interview broadcast on Radio France Culture in February 1981, Philippe Nemo asked Levinas what were “the first great books” he encountered, “the Bible or the philosophers?” Levinas answered by saying that he read the Bible while very young but only began to read philosophy with any seriousness at university. He proceeded, however, to volunteer a third category of great books, [End Page 1]between the Bible and the philosophers, the Russian classics—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and also the great writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare, much admired in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.2If we treat this as a chronology, then Levinas would have first read Shakespeare at some time “between” the age of six, when he began reading the Bible and other Hebrew texts with a private tutor, and the age of seventeen, when he enrolled at the University of Strasbourg.A polyglot, Levinas could have read Shakespeare in English as well as in Russian translation, but also in French, German, or Hebrew translation. For that matter, he could have read it in Lithuanian translation.3 We don’t know which French edition he read first or drew upon most closely.4 In Time and the Other, he follows the translation of Émile Montégut for Macbeth but for Romeo and Juliet, as noted in Sean Lawrence’s article, he does not repeat verbatim any of the major translations. When he quotes Shakespeare in English, he follows an original spelling edition. In the notebooks that he kept during imprisonment, and part of which we have translated here, Levinas appears to quote Shakespeare in English from memory, but incorrectly.This error notwithstanding, the Carnets de captivité show the imprisoned Levinas reading widely in English. Perhaps he expected a victory by the anglo-phone powers, or perhaps he practiced a sort of defiance in reading the language of his captors’ enemies, or perhaps he sought to strengthen his understanding of one of the European languages he had neglected in the precocity of his youth. Besides Shakespeare, we find him reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke within our selection. Elsewhere in the notebooks, he refers to Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, L. Ryder Haggard, Maurice Baring, Millen Brand, Pearl Buck, and Edgar Allan Poe.5 His references range from the cursory—in the case of Brand’s The Outward Room, it consists only of its title and author—to the surprisingly detailed and suggestive. After reading... (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that great works of literature have an impact on people's lives. Well known literary characters—Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Don Quixote—acquire iconic or mythic status and their stories, in more or less detail, are revered and recalled often in contexts far beyond the strictly literary. At the level of national literatures, familiar characters and plots are assimilated into a wider cultural consciousness and help define national stereotypes and norms of behaviour. In the English speaking world, Shakespeare's (...) plays or the novels of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Trollope, provide imaginative material that reverberates in people's lives every bit as much as do the great historical figures, like Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I, Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill. What is striking is how often fictional characters from the literary tradition—like the well-loved Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Tess of the d'Ubervilles—enter readers' lives at a highly personal level. They become, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, our ‘friends’, and for many readers the lives of these characters become closely entwined with their own. Happy and unhappy incidents in the fictional worlds are held up against similar incidents in the real lives of readers and such readers take inspiration from the courage, ingenuity, or good fortune of their fictional heroines and heroes. Nowhere is it more true that life imitates art. (shrink)

Beginning with an examination of the process whereby punishment turns its point of application from body to subject, and its scene of application from public to private -- as Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish -- this paper attempts to complicate Foucault’s thesis of a shift from corporeal visibility to invisibility as it appears in his account of the withdrawal of punishment from a public, spectacular domain into the no less public yet private sphere of the prison by attending to (...) the transformations of spectacle itself which accompanied this process of disembodiment. The embodied spectacle of punishment -- the state’s theatre of cruelty -- gave way to a disembodied discursive explosion of images of crime and punishment, and this process can be traced through the texts of Bentham and Dickens. Foucault’s dichotomy between the spectacle of public punishment and the disciplinary, non-spectacular prison overlooks the importance of images of crime and punishment which come to pervade public discourse and imagination as part of the installation of the disciplinary régime. Spectacularizing entails a move from the specific, embodied singularity of spectacle to the condition of a generalized, disembodied, and continual insistence: it is this that constitutes and characterizes the shift from spectacular sovereignty to disciplinary surveillance. This spectacularizing is akin to the spectre: “some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other”. The spectre haunting the nineteenth century was the criminal, and that century’s rationalizing of crime and punishment was based upon a fear of the spectral itself. (shrink)

Many psychometricians and behavioral geneticists believe that high heritability of IQ test scores within racial groups coupled with environmental hypotheses failing to account for the differences between the mean scores for groups lends plausibility to explanations of mean differences in terms of genetic factors. This two-component argument cannot be sustained when viewed in the light of the conceptual and methodological themes introduced in Taylor . These themes concern the difficulties of moving from the statistical analysis of variance of observed traits (...) to investigation of measurable genetic factors and measurable environmental factors. One such theme is that quantities estimated by an AOV of observed traits cannot be equated with measurable genetic or environmental factors involved in the development of those traits. Once this distinction is clear, the argument that environmental factors have failed to explain the differences lacks weight because it does not consider whether genetic factors have been more successful. This article exposes additional flaws in the lines of thinking associated with the two-component argument, with the distinction between passive, reactive, and active associations between genetic and environmental factors, and with the reciprocal causation models Dickens and Flynn propose in order to reconcile high estimates of heritability and large IQ test score gains between generations. Human heritability estimates are irrelevant in developing explanations of differences across groups or across generations. My critique is directed at opening up more conceptual space for deriving empirically validated models of developmental pathways whose components are heterogeneous and differ among individuals at any one time and over generations. (shrink)

"Outer space" is a curious dialectical zone—on the one hand, it consists of a number of elements defined as being distinct from the Earth; on the other hand, it has a repeated, daily impact on the Earth. The apparent emptiness of much of outer space—the space of space—suggests a literalization of the ou-topia, the no place, an inky black blank in which technology would be required for human survival. But that void can be converted into a tool—especially in the location (...) of the geostationary orbit for satellites. Equally, the rest of space offers resources that may facilitate the creation of a new society with a... (shrink)

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

Public health aims to provide universal safety and progressive opportunities to populations to realise their highest level of health through prevention of disease, its progression or transmission. Screening asymptomatic individuals to detect early unapparent conditions is an important public health intervention strategy. It may be designed to be compulsory or voluntary depending on the epidemiological characteristics of the disease. Integrated screening, including for both syphilis and cancer of the cervix, is a core component of the national reproductive health program in (...) Kenya. Screening for syphilis is compulsory while it is voluntary for cervical cancer. Participants’ perspectives of either form of screening approach provide the necessary contextual information that clarifies mundane community concerns. (shrink)

Discusses some of the most popular misconceptions about science, and their continuing role in the public imagination. Drawing upon the history and philosophy of science it challenges widespread assumptions and misunderstandings, from creationism and climate change to the use of statistics and computer modeling. The result is an engaging introduction to contentious issues in the philosophy of science and a new way of looking at the role of science in society.

A complete system of classical Aristotelian logic intended for honors high school and college.

Ohne Rücksicht auf disziplinäre Schranken bringt dieses Buch verschiedene nicht-reduktionistische Lerntheorien miteinander ins Gespräch. In einem offenen Diskurs, der die Konzepte zueinander in Beziehung setzt, werden die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven kritisch abgewogen und hinsichtlich ihrer Stärken und Schwächen diskutiert.

Delo se loteva vprašanja aktualnosti pojma subjekta v filozofiji in politiki skozi analizo tistih avtorjev, ki so ga domnevno najbolj radikalno pokopali: pokaže, da vznik radikalno novega in problematika subjekta zavzema osrednje mesto v Deleuzovi filozofiji, kakor tudi v Lyotardovi pozni misli posvečeni praznini, v Foucaultovi obravnavi biopolitike in biooblasti, v delu Negrija in Hardta o Imperiju, ter nazadnje v Badioujevi predelavi temeljnih filozofskih kategorij biti, resnice in subjekta, na osnovi katerih je dandanes znova možna renesansa filozofije. Ta ima po (...) Badiouju štiri razsežnosti, ki se v delu Vznik subjekta nenehno prepletajo: »V osnovi želja filozofije implicira razsežnost upora: ni filozofije brez nezadovoljstva mišljenja v njegovem soočenju s svetom, kakršen je. Pa vendar želja filozofije vključuje tudi logiko: to je, prepričanje v moč argumenta in uma.«. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

It may be most convenient to respond to Dr Andreae’s points in turn. Unless the claim that a child should determine its own genetic characteristics before it is conceived or born is intended to be flippant, it is logically incoherent. Conception is a decision that only a prospective parent can make. The editorial argument is that denial of choice of sex contributes to preventable maternal mortality and morbidity, particularly in developing countries. ….

This book features two old philosophical friends engaged in lively personal and intellectual conversations. Wary of any dogmatism, their dialogues explore the Big Bang and the joy of grandchildren, value theory and terrorism, God and art, metaphor and meaning, while assessing the thought of Robert S. Hartman, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, H. Richard Niebuhr, and others.

I contend that Jews, Christians, and Muslims who seek peace should not be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of their sometimes profound disagreements, or to affirm the truth of their own beliefs and practices. Since this places me at odds with John Hick, I analyze his views, granting the strengths of his critical realism and arguing that his revisionist-pluralist theory of religion has significant limitations for interreligious dialogue. Since the veridical-pluralist alternative I propose facilitates rather than stifles disagreement, I examine (...) three different conceptions of dialogue that acknowledge the importance of disputes among those searching for truth. I also discuss three virtues--honesty, empathy, and humility--whose cultivation would make us less likely to fail in our search for truth and the peace that is its sign and fruit. (shrink)

This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee Thass of a millennial anticaste communitas (community) in creative opposition to caste immunitas (immunity). It argues that Thass’s casteless community makes an appeal as it withdraws from caste and Brahminism by differentiating itself from enclosure. Thass’s works sought to conceive and construct a community against caste in the vernacular both in the global and local context by way of a highly scholarly as well as creative engagement with (...) Buddhism and the Tamil literary archive. In the colonial and nationalist context of the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent, his interpretative imaginaire of the history of India—Indhira Dhesa Sarithiram—was a pedagogy that establishes a belonging to world community and, at the same time, to one’s own vernacular communities. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at (...) an opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.