It is not uncommon to hear that poor school performance, welfare dependancy, youth unemployment, and criminal activity result more from shortcomings in the personal makeup of individuals than from societal forces beyond their control. Are American values declining as so many suggest? And are those values at the root of many social problems today?Shaped by experience and public policies, people's values and social norms do change. What role can or should a democratic government play in shaping values? And how do (...) these values conditon the efficacy of public policy?In this book, six distinguished social scientists identify trends in America's values and their consequences, and consider public policy tools with which some of those values might be changed.Daniel Yankelovich begins with a discussion of how American values have shifted in the last half-century, and argues that affluence is the driving force behind these changes in values. James Q. Wilson argues that destructive habits which can lead to social pathologies, like crime and drug use, are set early in life; he examines how public policy might intervene when children are young to promote better values. David Popenoe maintains that America has veered too far towards industrialist values, and explores the resulting decline of families and many attendant social ills. Nathan Glazer describes the history and present status of the dispute over multicultural education. Jane Mansbridge examines the process of building cooperation, consensus, and public spirit. And George Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen discuss the problem of gang criminality.Inthe past, social scientists have often sidestepped questions about values as undefinable, unquantifiable, and somehow unscientific. The essays in this volume address these questions at last.Henry J. Aaron, director of the Economic Studies program at Brookings, is the authorof numerous books, including most recently Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing America's Health Care (1991), and coeditor of Setting Domestic Priorities (1992). Thomas E. Mann is director of the Brookings Governmental Studies program, coeditor of Media Polls in American Politics (1992), and coauthor of the Renewing Congress series (1993). Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives at Stanford University. (shrink)

Drugs used to provide improvement of cognitive functioning have been shown to be effective in healthy individuals. It is sometimes assumed that the use of these drugs constitutes cheating in an academic context. We examine whether this assumption is ethically sound. Beyond providing the most up-to-date discussion of modafinil use in an academic context, this contribution includes an overview of the safety of modafinil use in greater depth than previous studies addressing the issue of cheating. Secondly, we emphasize two crucial, (...) but hitherto nearly overlooked, nuances to the issues: the potential for modafinil to decrease inequality and disadvantage in academic settings, and the fact that how modafinil is used dramatically impacts its effects on health, coercion, fairness, authenticity and effort. Finally, we explicitly defend the position that there are no qualitatively morally relevant differences between modafinil use and other enhancement modalities; any such differences are in degree,... (shrink)

We describe a new class of experiments designed to probe the foundations of quantum mechanics. Using quantum controlling devices, we show how to attain a freedom in temporal ordering of the control and detection of various phenomena. We consider wave–particle duality in the context of quantum-controlled and the entanglement-assisted delayed-choice experiments. Then we discuss a quantum-controlled CHSH experiment and measurement of photon’s transversal position and momentum in a single set-up.

One of the most difficult and perplexing tenets of classical theism is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Broadly put, this is generally understood to be the thesis that God is altogether without any proper parts, composition, or metaphysical complexity whatsoever. For a good deal more than a millennium, veritable armies of philosophical theologians – Jewish, Christian and Islamic – proclaimed the truth and importance of divine simplicity. Yet in our own time, the doctrine has enjoyed no such support. Among many (...) otherwise orthodox theists, those who do not just disregard it completely explicitly deny it. However, in a couple of recent articles, William E. Mann has attempted to expound the idea of divine simplicity anew and to defend it against a number of criticisms. He even has gone so far as to hint at reaffirming its importance, suggesting that the doctrine may have a significant amount of explanatory power and other theoretical virtue as part of an overall account of the nature of God, by either entailing or in other ways providing for much else that traditional theists have wanted to say about God. In this paper, I want to take a close look at Mann's formulation of the doctrine and at a general supporting theory he adumbrates in his attempt to render more plausible, or at least more defensible, various of its elements and implications. As Mann has made what is arguably the best attempt to defend the doctrine in recent years, I think that such an examination is important and will repay our efforts. (shrink)

One of the most difficult and perplexing tenets of classical theism is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Broadly put, this is generally understood to be the thesis that God is altogether without any proper parts, composition, or metaphysical complexity whatsoever. For a good deal more than a millennium, veritable armies of philosophical theologians – Jewish, Christian and Islamic – proclaimed the truth and importance of divine simplicity. Yet in our own time, the doctrine has enjoyed no such support. Among many (...) otherwise orthodox theists, those who do not just disregard it completely explicitly deny it. However, in a couple of recent articles, William E. Mann has attempted to expound the idea of divine simplicity anew and to defend it against a number of criticisms. He even has gone so far as to hint at reaffirming its importance, suggesting that the doctrine may have a significant amount of explanatory power and other theoretical virtue as part of an overall account of the nature of God, by either entailing or in other ways providing for much else that traditional theists have wanted to say about God. In this paper, I want to take a close look at Mann's formulation of the doctrine and at a general supporting theory he adumbrates in his attempt to render more plausible, or at least more defensible, various of its elements and implications. As Mann has made what is arguably the best attempt to defend the doctrine in recent years, I think that such an examination is important and will repay our efforts. (shrink)

The doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no physical or metaphysical complexity whatsoever, is not a doctrine designed to induce immediate philosophical acquiescence. There are severe questions about its coherence. And even if those questions can be answered satisfactorily in favour of the doctrine, there remains the question why anyone should accept it. Thomas V. Morris raises both sorts of questions about a version of the doctrine which I have put forward. In the following pages I (...) shall respond to what I take to be the most serious of Morris's objections. I shall argue that the doctrine survives Morris's onslaught, but that one observation of his points it in a direction I had hitherto not taken seriously. The bulk of Morris's paper raises questions of the first sort; perforce the bulk of my paper will also. I shall offer, at the end, a reason for thinking that neither of us is yet in a position to pronounce categorically on the second question. My remarks in this paper constitute an interim report on how I think things presently stand with divine simplicity. (shrink)

This book offers a thorough account of Thomas Reid's philosophy, focussing on his expressionist aesthetics, then traces his influence in nineteenth-century ...

Thomas Piketty has offered, and many have desperately snatched at,The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Moneyof our epoch. Piketty’s affinity with John Maynard Keynes and his groundbreaking 1936 landmark is largely unreflexive. But the ties that bind him to Keynes are powerful, and manifest themselves at many levels inCapital in the Twenty-First Century. The epistemology, the political stance, the methodological commitments, and the politics resonate in imperfect but remarkable harmony. This is no accident, because the world in which (...) Piketty’s book appeared is saturated with the specifically capitalist form of anxiety that Keynes sought to diagnose, and fix, the last time it made the richest economies in the world tremble. (shrink)

This volume consists of three principal parts. Its centerpiece is a collection of Thomas Reid's lectures and papers on practical ethics, heretofore unpublished; this is preceded by an introductory essay and followed by an extended commentary.

This book announces itself to be an introduction to the philosophy of Thomas Reid which seeks to attain this goal through a critical examination of Reid's principal doctrines. The central focus, as the title indicates, is Reid's own critique of "the way of ideas"--that philosophical approach commonly linked to empiricism, which regards the individual mind as having direct access only to ideas, thus rendering the external, material world either problematic or fictitious.

This book is careful and insightful, both in its analysis of Reid and in its treatment of the question of free will. While the title might suggest a balance of attention between the issues of freedom and morality, in truth this is a book about freedom, and it is only because moral responsibility has long been linked with freedom that Reid's moral philosophy receives any attention.

Anhand des fiktiven Falles eines jungen Mannes, dessen Leben trotz der vermeintlichen Vorteile von verbesserten genetischen Anlagen nicht so gerät, wie es sich die Eltern vorgestellt haben, fragen wir nach dem Maßstab des Erfolgs von genetischen Interventionen am Menschen. Wir kommen zu dem Schluß, daß die bisherigen Erfahrungen, die wir an anderen, weniger komplizierten Organismen wie Algen schon gesammelt haben, darauf hindeuten, daß die Resultate von Genmanipulationen viel weniger vorhersagbar sind und damit die Risiken für die Menschen viel höher und (...) unüberschaubarer sein werden, als die Optimisten aus der Genforschung bisher anzunehmen scheinen. Außerdem stellen wir die Frage, ob diese Richtung der vermeintlichen Verbesserung des menschlichen Lebens wirklich geeignet ist, tatsächlich die Leben der einzelnen Menschen oder der Menschheit insgesamt besser zu machen, oder ob sie nicht vielmehr auf einem engen Begriff des Lebenserfolgs beruht, der von den eigentlich ethischen Fragen nach dem besseren Leben für die Menschen eher ablenkt. Wenn dies der Fall wäre, würde sich die Suche nach den entscheidenden Verbesserungen des menschlichen Lebens auf dem Wege der genetischen Intervention nicht nur aus technischen, sondern auch aus ethischen Gründen als bedenklich erweisen. (shrink)

Contents:Acknowledgements Foreword (Lt. Ervin J. Rokke)Preface (Davis S. Alberts and Thomas Czerwinski)SETTING THE SCENEThe Simple and the Complex (Murray Gell-Mann)America in the World Today (Zbigniew Brzezinski)COMPLEXITY THEORY and NATIONAL SECURITY POLICYComplex Systems: The Role of Interactions (Robert Jervis)Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs (James N. Rosenau)Complexity, Chaos, and National Security Policy: Metaphors or Tools? (Alvin M. Saperstein)The Reaction to Chaos (Steven R. Mann)COMPLEXITY THEORY, STRATEGY, and OPERATIONSClausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Importance of Imagery (Alan D. Beyerchen)Complexity and (...) Organization Management (Robert R. Maxfield)Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory (John F. Schmitt)Complexity Theory and Air Power (Steven M. Rinaldi)Chaos Theory and U. S. Military Strategy: A "Leapfrog" Strategy for U.S. Defense Policy (Michael J. Mazarr)Contributors EditorsBibliography. (shrink)

T.J. Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Thomas mann, and offers as comprehensive a view of Mann's fiction and thought as is available in any language. It is based on a coherent close reading of Mann's oeuvre, literary and political, and also on manuscripts and sources, and was part of the first phase of literary scholarship that opened up the resources of the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive. Further documents that have appeared (...) since then - Mann's diaries, notebooks, and other correspondences - have not fundamentally altered the individual interpretations or the overall picture the study offers, and in some respects have emphatically confirmed them. A further chapter added to this edition covers the new documentation, gives a vigorous account of the main curents in Mann scholarship and criticism over the last two decades suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and above all the complex relationship between the three. (shrink)

O combate que Thomas Mann travou contra o nazismo a partir de 1922 é exemplar, pois é o de um escritor apaixonado pela liberdade e não o de um militante. Ele privilegia a ficção e o mito como meios de luta contra o fascí- nio exercido pelo nazismo e afirma a permanência de uma Alemanha cultural, cosmopolita, fonte de uma universalidade estranha a todos os particularismos étnicos. Goethe, com quem ele se identifica e no qual se projeta, é a (...) figura de proa dessa Alemanha. (shrink)

Thomas Mann developed one of the most subtle theories of irony during World War I, concluding that the best irony was irony against both sides of any issue. Such irony was not inconsistent with love for humanity, and even for both sides. He may well have been justified in using irony against both sides in that war. But with the rise of the Nazis, he abandoned two-sided irony and used his irony mostly against them. One the one hand, this (...) meant a better political position, but on the other hand irony was almost absent from many of his wartime essays and declarations. That may have been justified in such a time of danger, but it meant less art and subtlety in his political writings. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse the symbolic meaning of the Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain. We try to see the scope of the interpretations that consider the metaphors of death, time and culture as the main subject of the novel. Finally, we sustain the idea that Thomas Mann wants to tell us that beauty and perfection are the reverse of death and suffering.

Son of a North German businessman, Thomas Mann chose as theme for his early narrative work the conflict between the standards and values of business and those of the artist-writer.Buddenbrooks andTonio Kröger exhibit the tension of values in opposite ways. InThe Magic Mountain, Mann expands his canvas to include military as well as business values in their relation to the creative potential in a young engineer who exiles himself to an Alpine tuberculosis sanatorium to enjoy a unique educational experience. (...) Mann believed that the businessman, like the artist, had a light and dark side, committed by the Protestant ethic, yet bound to entrepreneurial standards of utility and profit. On that account, the businessman, like the creative artist, may experience a certain alientation from ‘Life’. (shrink)

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), was a leading figure in the 20th century and is writer who has been widely mentioned in world litetarure. He is known not only as the writer of milestone novels but also as the master of oppositions. The Buddenbrook’s Family (1901), The Death in Venice (1912), and The Magıc Mountain (1924) in particular are inspiring the same emotions in the readers of today as the day they were written. While these masterpieces have been the subject of (...) literature research and psychoanalysis, they have also been of interest in the realm of philosophy. In particular, from the perspective of philosophy, The Magic Mountain, was the main concern of this study. This study will indicate both the modern aspects of the story as well as try to show how this work was a mirror for its time. The story takes place in a sanatorium where people who suffering from tuberculosis are sent to recover. This is an illness without remedy in its time and which was widespread through the 19th century. Switzerland, with its lofty mountains, was chosen as a location for tuberculosis senatoriums which offered fresh air, good nutrition, and light exercise. While the hospitals of Davos village tried to treat the patients’ lung spots, they also forced them to follow a life of dicipline. The fact that the “spotted” people went to the senatorium, with no intention of going back to their previous life is the main concern of this study. The most interesting fact here is the chain of events that connected earth to the mystical mountains of this town. The main issue will be the question of why people perceived this earthly place in such a different way. (shrink)

The German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann perceived World War I as a moral battle against the civilization project rooted in the European enlightenment. Like many other German intellectuals of that time, Mann stresses an opposition between the concept of culture and that of civilization – this conflict is seen as inherent in the European soul – and defends Germany’s right to remain a culture that does not evolve into a civilization. The concept of culture can contain (...) irrational features such as mystical, bloody and terrifying teachings, whereas civilization is characterized by reason, enlightenment, skepticism and hostility towards passion and emotion. In his major work The Magic Mountain however, Mann tries to overcome this opposition and displays, through the metaphors of the text, that a new humanism is dependent upon a mystical and completely illogical balance between culture and civilization. The main character of the novel does not succeed in finding this balance. But, nonetheless, Mann continues to see the possibilities of a new humanism through this perspective in order to point out a humanistic hope in the shadesof two European world wars. (shrink)

The writers Thomas Mann and Erich Kästner took in the years between 1933 and 1945 extreme positions of inner and outer emigration, which can be shown concerning autobiographical aspects and concerning their works which they wrote during the time of national socialism. While Kästner, who represents the inner emigration, wrote humorous stories like "Drei Männer im Schnee" and "Der kleine Grenzverkehr", Mann completed his tetralogy of "Joseph und seine Brüder", which deals with the foundation and development of the monotheistic (...) jewish world religion, in France, Switzerland and America where in 1943 he began his dark artist novel "Doktor Faustus", while in Europe internicine warfare and the Shoa were in progress. While Erich Kästner, who was a very engaged political author in the so called Weimar Republic, was captivated during the period of national socialism by his inwardness, Thomas Mann released himself from this attitude in view of the Third Reich and became an emancipated author who was politically engaged and with moral integrity. (shrink)