This book encourages renewed attention by contemporary epistemologists to an area most of them overlook: ancient philosophy. Readers are invited to revisit writings by Plato, Aristotle, Pyrrho, and others, and to ask what new insights might be gained from those philosophical ancestors. Are there ideas, questions, or lines of thought that were present in some ancient philosophy and that have subsequently been overlooked? Are there contemporary epistemological ideas, questions, or lines of thought that can be deepened by gazing back upon (...) some ancient philosophy? The answers are 'yes' and 'yes', according to this book's 13 chapters, written by philosophers seeking to enrich contemporary epistemology through engaging with ancient epistemology. Key features: Blends ancient epistemology with contemporary epistemology, each reciprocally enriching each. Conceptually sensitive chapters by scholars of ancient epistemology. Historically sensitive chapters by scholars of contemporary epistemology. Clearly written chapters, guiding readers at once through central elements both of ancient and of contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

This volume brings together mostly previously unpublished studies by prominent historians, classicists, and philosophers on the roles and effects of religion in Socratic philosophy and on the trial of Socrates. Among the contributors are Thomas C. Brickhouse, Asli Gocer, Richard Kraut, Mark L. McPherran, Robert C. T. Parker, C. D. C. Reeve, Nicholas D. Smith, Gregory Vlastos, Stephen A. White, and Paul B. Woodruff.

Chi biasima la pittura, biasima la natura . . . . Stephen Newton is a 53 year old professional artist with a doctorate from the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is therefore one of a niche academic fraternity working the disputed borderlands between empirical cognitive science, psychoanalysis as a school of neurophilosophy, psychoanalysis as a clinical professionalism, and the philosophy of art. This is his first high profile book, and it stands proudly in a (...) series which goes back to Freud's 'Leonardo' and which includes Ehrenzweig's 'The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing' , Kuhn's 'Psychoanalytic Theory of Art' , Gedo's 'The Artist and the Emotional World' , Glover's 'Psychoanalytic Aesthetics' , and a host of anthropological input from the likes of Andr? Leroi-Gourhan, Michel Lorblanchet, Georges Sauvet, Jean Clottes, and Howard Morphy. The book's seven chapters fall into two neat sections, namely an early theoretical statement on the psychodynamics of artistic creation, followed by an erudite application and extension of that theory. (shrink)

This book is the compilation of over fifty years of teaching Metaphysics, Philosophy of the Person, Epistemology, and Ethics, including Virtue Ethics, in the classroom setting. Philosophy Begins in Wonder offers the classroom dynamic on the written page. Here you will find philosophical questions raised, many possible answers provided, guidance in discerning how to evaluate the answers, and encouragement for even greater considerations beyond the scope of this book. Philosophy that begins in wonder is open to proceeding further in a (...) lifetime journey of wonder, avoiding the unnecessary pitfalls of cynicism, pessimism, and despair. This spirit of wonder offers to one a life of amazement, joy, gratitude and, therein, often the unexpected moments of knowledge, understanding, insights, and occasionally wisdom. --- back cover of book. (shrink)

The impact of Gilles Deleuze on critical thought in the opening decades of the twenty-first century rivals that of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault on critical thought in the closing decades of the twentieth. The "Deleuze and..." industry is in overdrive in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond, busily connecting Deleuzian philosophy to everything from literature to architecture, metaphysics to mathematics, ethics to physics, sexuality to technology, and ecology to theology. What of Deleuze and the Bible? What does the (...) Bible become when it is plugged into the Deleuzian corpus? An immense affective assemblage, among other things. And what does biblical criticism become in the process? A practice of close reading that is other than interpretation and renounces the concept of representation. The book begins with an extended exposition of Deleuzian thought, and proceeds to unexegetical explorations of five successive themes: Text (how to make yourself a Bible without Organs, and why); Body (why there are no bodies in the Bible, and how to read them anyway); Sex (a thousand tiny sexes, a trillion tiny Jesuses); Race (Jesus and the white faciality machine); and Politics (democracy, despots, pandemics, ancient prophets). Cumulatively, these explorations limn the fluid contours of a Bible after Deleuze. (shrink)

"Anton Wilhelm Amo is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. We give an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo's life and work, and provide Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo's two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and (...) Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body The Distinct Idea works out the implications for the mind's actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by 'intentions' which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Both dissertations try to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body, and expose and resolve earlier philosophers' self-contradictions on these questions"--. (shrink)

The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers reveals how great philosophers of the past sought to answer the question of the meaning of life. This edited collection includes thirty-five chapters which each focus on a major figure, from Confucius to Rorty, and that imaginatively engage with the topic from their perspective. This volume also contains a Postscript on the historical origins and original significance of the phrase 'the meaning of life'.

This volume is the first full-length attempt from within the fields of theological and biblical studies to grapple with "the turn to the animal" currently underway in the humanities, a turn catalyzed in part by the animality theory that has issued from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway.

Two prevailing paradigms explain the diversity of sex-determining modes in reptiles. Many researchers, particularly those who study reptiles, consider genetic and environmental sex-determining mechanisms to be fundamentally different, and that one can be demonstrated experimentally to the exclusion of the other. Other researchers, principally those who take a broader taxonomic perspective, argue that no clear boundaries exist between them. Indeed, we argue that genetic and environmental sex determination in reptiles should be seen as a continuum of states represented by species (...) whose sex is determined primarily by genotype, species where genetic and environmental mechanisms coexist and interact in lesser or greater measure to bring about sex phenotypes, and species where sex is determined primarily by environment. To do otherwise limits the scope of investigations into the transition between the two and reduces opportunities to use studies of reptiles to advance understanding of vertebrate sex determination generally. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

American universities are increasingly proactive in dealing with conflict of interest problems of their faculty. Changing social norms, publicized scandals, and more have made both university administrators and faculty extra alert to the dangers of faculty infidelity to their roles as teachers and scholars. Personal interests — both financial and non-financial — appear increasingly to pressure faculty to behave inappropriately. Most faculty members resist those pressures. Yet, enough conduct that either is, or appears to be, improper has occurred to prompt (...) the adoption by universities of an ever-more complex regulatory regime. This regime no longer relies primarily upon threats of after-the-fact punishment for gross deviations from professorial norms. Instead, universities have also enacted a wide array of in-advance restrictions. These include required disclosures by faculty members of certain private interests, prohibitions of specific faculty behavior, and specified instances in which faculty members must temporarily withdraw from their professorial roles in light of their private interests. This article draws especially upon the author’s experience at the University of California to illustrate the new system of regulation. (shrink)

Krasner considers the decline of the global economic power the United States enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1960s and prescribes a policy of repricocity to restore the country's postwar position, allowing it to compete effectively in an emerging and changing economic climate.

The “therapeutic obligation” is a physician’s duty to provide his patients with what he believes is the best available treatment. We begin by discussing some prominent formulations of the obligation before raising two related considerations against those formulations. First, they do not make sense of cases where doctors are permitted to provide suboptimal care. Second, they give incorrect results in cases where doctors are choosing treatments in challenging epistemic environments. We then propose and defend an account of the therapeutic obligation (...) that solves the problems that undermined previous efforts at formulating the TO. We conclude by considering how apparent problems with our proposal actually rest on difficulties with informed consent. (shrink)

Everyone knows what it is to feel a conflict between a ‘non-rational’ desire and reason, as e.g., when we want a second dish of ice cream but think it would be unwise to take it. In such cases we commonly think of our desires as unreasonable: they prompt us to perform some action contrary to our deliberations. Nevertheless, most of us assume that reason can move us: that simply recognizing an act as the most reasonable thing to do gives us (...) a motive to do it — even if in fact we do not perform that action. If we do not eat the second dish of ice cream we are disposed to think that we did not because we judged it unwise. If, on the other hand, we do eat the second dish, we are disposed to think we did because we were more strongly inclined toward eating than not eating, even though we were inclined toward refraining because we judged eating unwise. This is the position of the man on the street. It is the commonsensical notion of reason, motivation, and their relationship. (shrink)