The role of the Nobel Laureate Henry Dale (1875-1968) in the history of allergy and the association of anaphylactic conditions with the liberation of histamine is often overlooked. This paper examines his work in this field in the broader context of his researches into endogenous mediators of normal physiological and abnormal pathological functioning. It also assesses the impact of his working environment, especially the unique conditions he enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories (...) (WPRL). The WPRL belonged to the pharmaceutical manufacturer Henry Wellcome, and it was the juxtaposition of the routine commercial obligation of testing drugs for Burroughs, Wellcome & Co., with the opportunities of pursuing unfettered physiological research in well-equipped and supported laboratories, that resulted in what Dale referred to as 'happy accidents' when one set of results suggested experimental strategies and designs to another circumstance. In this way an observation of an unusual effect of an extract of ergot of rye led to collaborative chemical and physiological explorations which revealed the presence of histamine, previously known only as a synthetic product. Further work, accidentally facilitated by the fact that the WPRL produced serum anti-toxins commercially and surplus horse serum was used in experiments where other physiologists routinely used saline, hinted that histamine played a role in the symptom complex known as anaphylaxis. This paper explores some of these themes and elaborates their significance. (shrink)

An excellent introduction to communication theory, this book is a comprehensive study of its subject; fields such as linguistics, logic, mathematics, and psychology are considered in terms of their relevance for communication theory. No material that appeared in the first edition has been deleted from this second edition, but some comments have been added, some figures updated, and the bibliography extended to include the new publications in the field. Cherry begins with an examination of the concept of "communication"; he also (...) discusses social structures, considering the pattern of communication within a social group. After this introductory chapter, Cherry presents an historical review of the evolution of communication theory; he discusses codes, signs, brains, and machines, mentioning the work of such scientists as Shannon, Zipf, and Wiener. Topics such as phonetics, phonemics, object language and metalanguage, Zipf's Law, and semantics are also considered, as well as the role of the telecommunication engineer, who describes and analyzes the physical signals themselves without reference to their meanings. In the concluding chapter, psychological considerations concerning the reception of information are presented: recognition, for example, of universals, of geometric figures, of speech sounds, of distorted speech, the relevance of past experience, and the intake of information by the senses. Although technical material is presented, the book is very readable; jargon is kept at a minimum. The result is an exceedingly interesting and stimulating book.—E. M. (shrink)

When Favaro compiled his magisterial 20-volume edition of Galileo’s works, he left aside a large quantity of manuscripts in Galileo’s hand, dating apparently from his youth. The Juvenilia, as Favaro called them, are written in Latin and deal with the standard topics covered in courses in natural philosophy and logic at that time. Two different dates of composition have been proposed: c. 1584, when the twenty-year-old Galileo was a student at the University of Pisa and c. 1590 when he was (...) already a lecturer at that university. Were the treatises transcribed by him from the class notes of one or more of his teachers? Were they compiled by him while still a student as part of his class work? Or were they composed by him as his own "official" class notes when he began to teach? Scores of authors, classical and contemporary, are quoted in them. To what extent does this reflect research on Galileo’s own part? Do the treatises reflect any innovation of doctrine or method attributable to Galileo himself? (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays in honor of Radoslav A. Tsanoff, Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Rice University for forty years. Besides a tribute to Tsanoff written by J. S. Fulton, there are ten essays written by distinguished philosophers, each considering a topic in his field of interest. Virgil Aldrich discusses the importance of language in an essay entitled "Self-Consciousness." An examination of the new in art and an attempt to explicate its value and rationale is (...) presented by Van Meter Ames; illustrative material is drawn from such sources as contemporary film, pop art and chance music. In "Social Science and Social Norms" Clifford Barrett discusses the relevance of facts and norms in systematic considerations of social scientists. C. P. Snow's concept of two cultures is examined by A. Cornelius Benjamin in "Philosophy and the Cultures." Other essays presented are "Philosophy and Common Sense" by George Boas, "Conscience and Conscientiousness" by A. Campbell Garnett, "Criteria for Ideas of God" by C. Hartshorne, and "Sovereignty and the Idea of Republic" by C. W. Hendel. Charles Morris examines the common themes of the pragmatic movement, discussing such fields as epistemology, axiology and cosmology, and such philosophers as Peirce, Dewey, Mead and Lewis. In the concluding essay G. R. Morrow discusses Plato's views about a God and the many gods of the Greek pantheon. This book is a loose collection of papers, lacking any single theme or determinate relation between the essays presented; each essay, however, is competently handled and is interesting in its own right.—E. M. (shrink)

This is an historically oriented textbook including selected writings from such varied thinkers as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Taine, Croce, Fry, Camus, etc. Richter presents an introduction designed to acquaint the student with the diversity of perspectives and problems that will be encountered in the course of the text. Aesthetics is here construed as a broader field in the 20th century than in the past. It is no longer to be defined as the philosophy of the beautiful or of art; it (...) is in fact no longer limited to philosophic concerns but encompasses "all studies of the arts and related types of experience from a philosophic, scientific, or other theoretical standpoint, including those of psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural history, art criticism, and education." The branching out of aesthetic concerns and methods is developed historically through the selections presented. Plato's discussions of aesthetics are seen to be subordinated to his political philosophy and doctrine of Ideas. Although they present a more complete aesthetic doctrine, the views of Schopenhauer and Hegel are also seen to be determined by their metaphysical systems. The romantic emphasis on the role of the artist by Tolstoy and Veron is represented, as well as the influence of positivism in the experimental approach of Taine. Each selection includes an introduction and discussion of the text along with study questions and suggested bibliography. The student is thus presented with most of the major theories of art, with art as imitation, as communication, as intuition, as experience, as rebellion; mimetic, empirical, and formalistic views on the nature of art are also confronted. Such discussions provide the basis for a recognition of interesting contrasts in views on aesthetic problems.—E. M. (shrink)

Helpful and thorough as an introduction to Santayana's aesthetic theory, Ashmore's presentation is an exposition of Santayana's views; he does not judge these views or attempt to develop them further. According to Ashmore, Santayana held a single aesthetic theory all his life, the nucleus of which was contained in his early poetry. However, he developed different aspects of this theory at different stages of his life. During the first stage, Santayana emphasizes aesthetic experience. In considering this topic Ashmore discusses aesthetic (...) value, and the psychological analysis that Santayana gives of this value. Next Santayana focuses on poetry and its criticism. Thus Ashmore examines topics such as the relation between poetry and religion, the relation between poetry and philosophy, and Santayana's formulation of a scale for judging poetry. The chapter entitled "Rational Art" presents the third major stage of Santayana's development; here Ashmore considers Santayana's construction of a theory of art. For Santayana, art, as distinct from fine art, is a rational activity in the pursuit of happiness. Ashmore concludes with a discussion of Santayana's final work, considering the additions to and modifications of his earlier views.—E. M. (shrink)

Frankena continues the development of his theory of justice presented in "The Concept of Social Justice." He begins by presenting the formal principle of justice—"similar cases are to be treated similarly." He points out that not all similarities and differences are relevant and "not just any manner of treatment may be assigned to any class of cases." The main body of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the most basic material principle of justice. Frankena tells us that he (...) will not attempt to present a proof of the material principle of distributive justice. His tack is to "try to give a rational case for one principle and against others," to present grounds for giving assent to one principle and withholding it from others. The basic criterion is the principle of equality which Frankena says is "that matters are to be so disposed... that everyone has an equal chance of achieving the best life he is capable of."—E. M. (shrink)

Given the tremendous burst of activity in the philosophy of science during the last quarter century, the number of books by trained philosophers dealing with the logic of biology is surprisingly small. Simon’s book resembles Morton Beckner’s The Biological Way of Thought in its comprehensive ambitions: "trying to discover what, if anything, is distinctive about biological science, its concepts, and its mode of explaining." The most obvious difference of the two books is Simon’s long central chapter on "Theories, Models, and (...) the Concept of the Gene," which deals with the history of genetics from Mendel’s predecessors to the successors of Watson and Crick. Beckner paid little explicit attention to the history of biology. Another difference lies in Beckner’s dogged assessment of all problems in the logic of biology from the perspective of what he called the Humean Pattern of Explanation—a detailed and difficult variant of the approach of Hempel, Oppenheim, and Nagel. Simon’s philosophical position is more flexible than Beckner’s. He provides an acceptable review of the literature of the last decade and a half; some of his conclusions are most interesting—even when incompletely supported by his arguments; and the utility of his book is insured by the fact that it is necessary to go back over twelve years to find another with which it can be compared. The first chapter contains a very effective critique of J. J. C. Smart’s thesis that biology is no more an autonomous science than is electrical engineering, but is merely applied physics and chemistry. Smart had argued from the grounds that all biological generalizations implicitly refer to terrestrial evolution and are not truly universal, and Simon demonstrates the general lack of success of all efforts to demonstrate a difference in kind between so-called laws of nature and empirical generalizations of the sort found in biology. The second chapter continues in this same vein, drawing an interesting contrast between phylogenetic explanation in biology and the explanation of individual events in human history, and claiming that ‘explanatory’ status may be granted to accounts which do not meet the requirements of the deductive-nomological model, as in the case of Darwin’s theories of the geographical distribution of plants and animals and the persistence of rudimentary organs. The author’s negative reaction to much of the recent philosophical literature concerning the role of functional analysis in biology seems particularly well placed. Following Hempel, most philosophers writing in the past ten years have regarded the occurrence of the item whose function is in question as the event to be explained. Simon correctly points out that in the biological literature, statements indicating the presence of this item are part of the explanans, usually one component in an explanation of the normal functioning of the organism. He also insists that functional or teleological statements cannot effectively be replaced by nonteleological ones. A functional account is one that relates an entity to the role it plays in an organized system. In the first of several serene non-sequiturs which mar the latter half of this book, Simon insists that the above account shows that the notion of function is essentially an "extrinsic" one and that teleological principles generally cannot be used to account for experience. No better argument than an appeal to Kant’s authority backs up this conclusion. The third chapter deals with the recent history of genetics; its summary makes the claim that "at no time during this history was it correct to say that one model was replaced by another one; rather, the development appears to have been one involving successive correction and refining of earlier conceptions. There has been no revolution: geneticists have always succeeded in either repelling or accommodating critical attacks on the model." The evidence presented earlier in the chapter confers some plausibility on this conclusion, but no more: Simon takes no notice of the controversy surrounding Kuhn and the notion of scientific revolutions, and provides no criteria by which to distinguish "revolutions" from "accommodations." The precise nature of the methodological continuity to be found in the history of genetics is crucial for the view that "biology, or at least genetics, must be regarded as incapable of yielding a complete explanation of the phenomena that come within its purview; if the ultimate principles appealed to are not those of chemistry and physics and hence essentially nonbiological, the explanation cannot be regarded as complete." The text does not clearly indicate the extent to which the author agrees with the statement just quoted; perhaps he only attributes it to "many biologists" impressed by the successes of molecular genetics. It is clear the Simon regards something he calls the "Cartesian attitude" as pervasive in biology. "Biologists are committed to attempting to explain the phenomena of life in terms of the nonliving... The property of being alive or being associated with a living system is simply not treated as a logical primitive within biological science." But this seems to take us back full circle—to the position of Smart, that biology is no more than applied physics and chemistry. Simon disagrees with Smart. How does he stand vis-a-vis this last statement of the Cartesian spirit he finds so pervasive in biology? I think he disagrees with it, but it is very hard to tell. Perhaps the answer is that the resolution of the issue of the autonomy of biology is a pragmatic matter, relative to a complex set of needs and commitments: the sorts of things that determine life styles, political attitudes, and religious points of view, as well as the growth of scientific understanding. The question of the precise configuration of Simon’s pragmatism remains very vague indeed—a consequence of his over use of the style of impersonal attribution rather than direct assertion. Simon says generally sane and familiar things about Biology and the Idea of Progress and about Biology and Ethics. The really startling assertion of the penultimate chapter, that "consciousness" is neither a biological nor a behavioral predicate, and that its foundations are essentially moral and legal, is unfortunately supported by no argument whatsoever. Instead, the reader is urged to examine two of the author’s previous articles.—E. M. (shrink)