A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

As Aristotle stated, scientific explanation is based on deductive argument--yet, Wesley C. Salmon points out, not all deductive arguments are qualified explanations. The validity of the explanation must itself be examined. _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_ provides a comprehensive account of the developments in scientific explanation that transpired in the last four decades of the twentieth century. It continues to stand as the most comprehensive treatment of the writings on the subject during these years. Building on the historic 1948 essay (...) by Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” which introduced the deductive-nomological model on which most work on scientific explanation was based for the following four decades, Salmon goes beyond this model's inherent basis of describing empirical knowledge to tells us “not only _what,_ but also _why_.” Salmon examines the predominant models in chronological order and describes their development, refinement, and criticism or rejection. _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_ underscores the need for a consensus of approach and ongoing evaluations of methodology in scientific explanation, with the goal of providing a better understanding of natural phenomena. (shrink)

For Rousseau, humankind is in a perpetual state of decay—decadency from an earlier, natural, primitive, and perfect state. For Rousseau, the natural man, or man in the state of beast, was of an era where humankind was unencumbered by that which is now entirely associated with society—that is, “. . . establishment of laws and of the right of property . . . the institution of magistracy . . . and the conversion of legitimate into arbitrary power.” For Kant, humankind (...) is in its natural state. For Kant, nature brings about conditions that continually develop and refine humankind’s dispositions, purposefully setting about societies in order to facilitate a foundation within all civilized society, whereby all of humankind’s goals may be achieved. All matters have their place—placed there by nature, as though with purpose. For Kant, nature intended for humankind to employ reason, to acquiesce to coercion for social cohesion, and to strive to build a society that is ever-increasingly progressing towards perfection. Nature uses humankind’s dispositions, including ‘antagonistic’ behavior to gradually bring about a, “perfectly just civil constitution.” Humankind’s highest goal yet to be achieved is for that just civil constitution to emerge from trial and error (in the form of wars, revolutions, secessions, abdications), over time, ultimately providing for development of other dispositions within a perfect society. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

he relationship between decadence and aesthetics is an intimate and complex one. Both the stock figure of the aesthete and the aestheticism of ‘art for art’s sake’ are classic decadent tropes with obvious sources in figures such as Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Yet the links between aesthetics and decadence are more conflicted than might first appear: historically, aesthetics has served both as a site for the theorisation of decadence and as the basis of an attempt (...) to stem it. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these intricate ties. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Charles Bernheimer described decadence as a "stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds." In this posthumously published work, Bernheimer succeeds in making a critical concept out of this perennially fashionable, rarely understood term. Decadent Subjects is a coherent and moving picture of fin de siècle decadence. Mature, ironic, iconoclastic, and thoughtful, this remarkable collection of essays shows the contradictions of the phenomenon, which is both a condition and a state of mind. In seeking to (...) show why people have failed to give a satisfactory account of the term decadence, Bernheimer argues that we often mistakenly take decadence to represent something concrete, that we see as some sort of agent. His salutary response is to return to those authors and artists whose work constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key late nineteenth-century authors such as Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. Through careful analysis of the literature, art, and music of the fin de siècle including a riveting discussion of the many faces of Salome, Bernheimer leaves us with a fascinating and multidimensional look at decadence, all the more important as we emerge from our own fin de siècle. (shrink)

The first decade of this century has seen the nascency of the first mathematical theory of general artificial intelligence. This theory of Universal Artificial Intelligence (UAI) has made significant contributions to many theoretical, philosophical, and practical AI questions. In a series of papers culminating in book (Hutter, 2005), an exciting sound and complete mathematical model for a super intelligent agent (AIXI) has been developed and rigorously analyzed. While nowadays most AI researchers avoid discussing intelligence, the award-winning PhD thesis (Legg, 2008) (...) provided the philosophical embedding and investigated the UAI-based universal measure of rational intelligence, which is formal, objective and non-anthropocentric. Recently, effective approximations of AIXI have been derived and experimentally investigated in JAIR paper (Veness et al. 2011). This practical breakthrough has resulted in some impressive applications, finally muting earlier critique that UAI is only a theory. For the first time, without providing any domain knowledge, the same agent is able to self-adapt to a diverse range of interactive environments. For instance, AIXI is able to learn from scratch to play TicTacToe, Pacman, Kuhn Poker, and other games by trial and error, without even providing the rules of the games. These achievements give new hope that the grand goal of Artificial General Intelligence is not elusive. This article provides an informal overview of UAI in context. It attempts to gently introduce a very theoretical, formal, and mathematical subject, and discusses philosophical and technical ingredients, traits of intelligence, some social questions, and the past and future of UAI. (shrink)

Decadence in philosophy means evaluating truth claims exclusively in terms of provocation, in terms of how vigorously they generate subsequent thought. The best truth/book/essay/video doesn’t settle questions, but produces still more thought, writing, production. -/- Decadence privileges the history of thinking over the history of truth. Thought’s history runs from base servility (the best thinking eliminates the need for itself by culminating in universal truth, Platonism), to dialectical servility (the ceaseless interplay of interpretation as a verb, and as (...) a noun, Nietzscheanism), to decadence, where thought overthrows truth’s independent value and incorporates assertions into its own expression and acceleration. -/- Decadence is defined as truth serving thought, and practiced when the only reason we have truths is to generate more thinking. While the definition structures well historically, the claim in Decadence of the French Nietzsche is not that there are serial epochs – Platonism followed by Nietzscheanism followed by Decadence – but that an esoteric vein of decadence runs through philosophy’s history. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Starting from the analysis of the critic which Nietzsche addresses to Wagner in his last texts, the author investigates the Nietzschean conception of décadence. Examining its artistic, religious, and philosophical aspects, he intends to show its close relationship to physiology.

Poland, being a post-Communist European country with a tradition of Marxists religious studies in operation till 1989, developed during the Communist Era an original way of connecting psychology of religion with the value-neutral study of religion. It is also a Catholic a country, in which psychology of religion was practiced in a bipolar milieu: religion as a “sensitive” topic was approached from either Marxist-atheist or Catholic religious perspective. Such dualistic divisions should end with the breaking of the Iron Curtain, and (...) opening to the West, but was it so in this country of contrasts? The article forms a bird’s eye look on the last three decades of the Polish psychology of religion, concentrating on the “concrete products of scientific inquiry” therefore main works of scholars in the field are presented, discussed and context-wise interpreted in order to provide some answers for that query. (shrink)

Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a conflict between Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze.

Decadence in philosophy is the reversal between thinking and truth: philosophical truths valued only insofar as they provoke more philosophical thought.

In this paper it is argued that the corresponding rise of postmodernism and the triumph of neo-liberalism are not only not accidental, the triumph of neo-liberalism has been facilitated by postmodernism. Postmodernism has been primarily directed not against mainstream modernism, the modernism of Hobbes, Smith, Darwin and social Darwinism, but against the radical modernist quest for justice and emancipation with its roots in German thought. The Social Democratic State, the principles of which were articulated by Hegel, is construed as a (...) partial triumph of this radical modernism, realizing a higher level of reciprocal recognition and overcoming much of the brutality of the Liberal State. Postmodernism is shown to be a manifestation of the decadence of the Social Democratic State, characterized by the disintegration of cognitive and ethical developments which have been the condition for people to form communities based on reciprocal recognition. In this regard it parallels the decadence which took place in ancient Rome, for similar reasons: both the Roman Empire and the Social Democratic State reduced people to passive recipients of the benefits of their societies. The implications of this are twofold. If Social Democracy is to be revived, it will require a struggle for ‘strong’ democracy; that is, for a major role for participatory democracy. On the other hand if people opt for the creation of confederations of genuinely democratic communities to replace the State, this will not be achieved by postmodern decadence but through the developments of cognitive forms and communities through which the recognition of people as free agents is instititionalized. (shrink)

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead. This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974 (...) he had something very different in mind for The History of Sexuality than the way things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions, studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to antiquity. This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last decade. (shrink)

This volume follows shifting conceptions of decadence in art and society at various moments in British literature. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui -- all of these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and time's linear nature. To reject the past as a given and to relish the subtleties of present nuance is the beginning of decadence. This study explores the inherent conflict between society's moral contempt toward purportedly decadent artists and (...) the artist's belief that the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation was true decadence. (shrink)

Beginning with a widespread definition of Decadence as when individual parts flourish at the expense of the whole, Regenia Gagnier - a leading cultural historian of late nineteenth-century Britain - shows the full range of meanings of individualism at the height of its promise. From Darwin and Mill to the Fin de Siècle and beyond, Gagnier establishes the individual in relation to its theoretical and practical contexts: the couple and parent/child dyad; the workshop and community; the nation and state; (...) cosmopolis and world-citizenship. She concludes that the relation of individual to social or part to whole is better understood in terms of dynamic functions than fixed identities. Some highlights in this richly detailed study include: the evolutionary and developmental sciences of the individual; Herbert Spencer and the Individualists; Matthew Arnold and the Culturalists; the New Women, Female Aesthetes, and Socialist Individualists; poetry and the Philosophy of the Will; Gypsy Lorists and Cultural Philanthropy; Nietzsche’s Good Europeans and Late Victorian Cosmopolitans; the doctrine of mystical substitution of the one for the many. No one gives a fuller picture of the individual in modernity. (shrink)

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for (...) the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role. (shrink)

The previous decade has seen renewed critical interest in the multiple realization argument. These criticisms constitute a "second wave" of challenges to this central argument in late-20th century philosophy of mind. Unlike the first wave, which challenged the premise that multiple realization is inconsistent with reduction or type identity, this second wave challenges the truth of the multiple realization premise itself. Since psychoneural reductionism was prominent among the explicit targets of the multiple realization argument, one might think that this second (...) wave of challenges provides important aid and comfort to reductionists. In this paper, however, I provide reasons for thinking it does not. This is not to the detriment of psychoneural reductionism because, as I also argue here, and unrecognized by the current non-reductive orthodoxy in philosophy of mind, one key argument among the first wave of criticisms of the multiple realization argument has never been adequately rejoined. (shrink)

A partir de la reprise par Nietzsche des analyses de Paul Bourget dans les Essais de psychologie contemporaine, l'auteur analyse la notion de décadence telle qu'elle s'applique, selon Nietzsche, dans l'art conçu d'un point de vue psychologique et physiologique. De l'œuvre de Wagner, envisagée physiologiquement dans Le cas Wagner, l'analyse de Nietzsche glisse vers la personne du Maître. L'analyse de cette notion capitale reliée à certaines problématiques centrales de l'œuvre permet de préciser la pensée du dernier Nietzsche. Starting from Nietzsche's (...) rehandling Paul Bourget's analyses in the Essais de psychologie contemporaine, the author analyzes the concept of decadence as applied, according to Nietzsche, to art conceived from a psychological and physiological point of view. From Wagner's work, studied physiologically in The Wagner Case, Nietzsche's analysis slides towards the character and personality of the Master. The analysis of this major notion, linked as it is to some very essential problematics inherent to the work, enables one to study much more precisely the thought of the late Nietzsche. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction: Decadence, Feminism and "Excess" Chapter 1: Consuming Craft, Cupcakes and Cocaine: Orly Cogan, Shane Waltener and Shelley Miller Chapter 2: Pleasure Craft: Nava Lubelski, Mickalene Thomas and Shary Boyle Chapter 3: Bad Women?: Tracey Emin, Ghada Amer and Allyson Mitchell Chapter 4: "The Decaying Fabrics of Life and Death": Rozanne Hawksley's Textile Art Bibliography -- Index.

ABSTRACT This article, presented in January 2020 to the North American Nietzsche Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, is a commentary on Andrew Huddleston's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. The focus is on Nietzsche's critical and positive arguments about the psychological and physiological nature of decadence, Nietzsche's conception of cultural health, and the role of art and artists in Nietzschean flourishing cultures.

In 1872 Nietzsche shocked the European philological community with the publication of the Birth of Tragedy. In this fervid first book Nietzsche looked to ancient Greek culture in the hope of finding the path to a revitalization of modern German culture. Cultural health was at this point unquestionably his paramount concern. Yet postwar Nietzsche scholarship has typically held that after his Untimely Meditations which followed soon after, Nietzsche’s philosophy took a sharply individualist turn—an interpretation largely due to Walter Kaufmann’s noble (...) and influential effort to counter the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche by stressing Nietzsche’s anti-political individualism and downplaying his seemingly more noxious Kulturphilosophie. But even after Nietzsche gave up on the idea of German culture as something blessed with inner truth and greatness and Nietzsche gave up on the idea of German culture as something blessed with inner truth and greatness and pregnant with the potential for renewed splendor–heaping scorn instead on the Germans and their newly-founded Reich–he still, I argue, continued to take culture, as a collective social achievement, to be something of prime importance. Indeed, it is for this reason that he took the flourishing of great individuals–especially artists and intellectuals–to be vital. Their singularity and their excellence redeems the decadent cultural landscape from the bovine blight of the “last man” and the self-satis!ed, uncreative, and barren mediocrity he represents. My dissertation uses Nietzsche’s perfectionistic ideal of a flourishing culture as a point of departure for investigating many of the central themes in his work: his criticism of the ideals enshrined in conventional morality; his attack on Christianity; his celebration of individual human excellence and cultural accomplishment; his lamentations about cultural decline; his troubling remarks about the need for slavery (“in some sense or other”) if a society is to flourish; and his grand ambitions for a “revaluation of all values.”. (shrink)

The world has changed in the last few decades. While the enforcement of international issues may once have been undermined by differences in transnational institutions, the onset of globalisation has led to a greater willingness amongst states to cooperate with each other. It is suggested that this could be a positive development for, amongst other things, gradually tackling climate change, global poverty and the greater realisation of human rights. What is needed is a period of reflection of how far we (...) have come and how we can use this to change for the future. (shrink)

The chapter outlines Nietzsche's view of decadence, its history and effects. The philosopher held decadence to be any condition, deceptively thought good, which limits what something or someone can be. This concept informs his critical and affirmative projects, acting as a versatile tool to identify and overcome his own decadence and to resist the decadence of Western culture. Decadence appears in five major areas of concern to Nietzsche: physiology; psychology; art and artists; politics; and philosophy. (...) Physical and mental phenomena provide the substrate of his understanding, but they manifest in cultural, political, and philosophical forms that, in turn, affect the body and mind. In each of the five areas, the concept of decadence for Nietzsche serves 1) to unmask valued cultural phenomena as corrupt, 2) to name and analyze degenerate effects, and 3) to spur reflection on how to respond. (shrink)

The journal Environmental Values is thirty years old. In this retrospective, as the retiring Editor-in-Chief, I provide a set of personal reflections on the changing landscape of scholarship in the field. This historical overview traces developments from the journal's origins in debates between philosophers, sociologists, and economists in the UK to the conflicts over policy on climate change, biodiversity/non-humans and sustainability. Along the way various negative influences are mentioned, relating to how the values of Nature are considered in policy, including (...) mainstream environmental economics, naïve environmental pragmatism, the strategic role of corporations, neoliberalism and eco-modernism/techno-optimism. At the same time core value debates around intrinsic value in Nature and instrumentalism remain relevant, along with how plural environmental values can be articulated and acted upon. Naturalness, human relations to non-humans, and Nature as other, remain central considerations. The broadening of issues covered by the journal (e.g. covering social psychology, sociology and political science), reflect the need to address both human behaviour and the structure of social and economic systems to confront ongoing social-ecological crises. (shrink)

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)

The article is devoted to reviewing the main provi- sions of the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 231 of April 25, 2022 “On Announc- ing the Decade of Science and Technology in the Russian Federation” and the actual practice of plan- ning and implementing the initiatives of the Decade of Science and Technology in the Chelyabinsk region, using the example of the digest of the events of the Days of Science — 2023 at the site of (...) the Chelyabinsk branch of the RANEPA. (shrink)

Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) formed a key component of the ‘new sociology of technology’, which emerged in mid-1980s and heralded the entry of social constructivist theory into the domain of technology from science. A large number of empirical case studies were generated using SCOT methodology in the following three decades, encompassing a wide range of technological artefacts or systems. This essay reviews the trajectory of SCOT as a distinct intellectual tradition in technology studies. First, an attempt is made to (...) appraise and classify the main strands of criticisms against SCOT that have come up over the years. Second, this essay discusses several new conceptual heuristics, which were successively incorporated by the original authors of SCOT, along with the concomitant broadening of analytical units and research questions. We conclude that, while SCOT demonstrated its resilience as a dynamic scholarly tradition and constantly adapted itself to address criticisms through the incorporation of new conceptual tools, the consequent methodological transition had profound implications for SCOT as a theory, somewhat undermining its original agenda and methodological distinctiveness in social studies of technology. (shrink)

This paper explains the decline of the humanities, showing hour this was predicted by Alfred North Whitehead, and argues the consequence is decadence. Reviving the humanities, it is argued, involves the advance of process philosophy overcoming the division between the sciences and humanities, and it is shown how this can orient people to challenge our decadent culture.

"Qui domine la littérature mondiale?" demandait Strindberg. "Péladan, Gorki, Maeterlink, Kipling" répondait-il. De ces noms, seul celui de Péladan n'évoque plus un livre précis pour nos contemporains. Certains se souviennent d'un auteur de la fin du siècle dernier qui s'était rendu célèbre par ses extravagances vestimentaires : son pourpoint Renaissance et sa barbe à l'assyrienne dans le Paris de la Belle Epoque défrayait la chronique. Les journalistes ont aussi consacré une large place à ses démêlés avec d'autres occultistes. Ses salons (...) de la Rose-Croix, pour lesquels Satie composa des sonneries, eurent une grande renommée et sont importants pour qui s'intéresse à l'histoire de l'art. Péladan, avec un sens certain de la publicité, s'était proclamé S.A.R., titre assyrien qui en faisait un descendant mythique des Mages chaldéens. C'est ce titre qui a assuré sa notoriété jusqu'à nos jours. D'androgynes pervers en femmes violées, mêlant la magie aux thèmes décadents, ses romans présentent un tableau étonnant de la pensée fin de siècle. Ce texte veut démontrer que Joséphin Péladan, qui eut des admirateurs comme Jarry ou Paul Valéry, n'était pas qu'un dandy excentrique, un farfelu 1900 teinté d'ésotérisme mais un authentique écrivain. Il existe un récit de Borgès qui raconte l'histoire d'un peintre qui voulut faire un tableau de l'univers. Au bout de nombreuses années de travail, il avait peint un mur entier de personnages pour s'apercevoir qu'en fait il n'avait peint que son propre visage. Ce fut précisément la destinée de Péladan : l'auteur ne fit plus qu'un avec son personnage principal du Mage. Jamais son œuvre n'aura présenté une telle fusion entre imaginaire et réalité. (shrink)

This article reviews developments in the field of service-learning, both in terms of general management education and business ethics specific courses, over the past 10 years. Using the 1996 Journal of Business Ethics special issue on service-learning as a benchmark, numerous accomplishments are presented and continued barriers are discussed. Finally, three issues are raised as next steps for service-learning authors and practitioners as we move forward into the next decade: (1) designing effective and sustainable university/community partnerships, (2) addressing problems stemming (...) from the conspiracy of courtesy, and (3) optimizing the intersection between online learning and service-learning. (shrink)

This article reviews developments in the field of service-learning, both in terms of general management education and business ethics specific courses, over the past 10 years. Using the 1996 Journal of Business Ethics special issue on service-learning as a benchmark, numerous accomplishments are presented and continued barriers are discussed. Finally, three issues are raised as next steps for service-learning authors and practitioners as we move forward into the next decade: designing effective and sustainable university/community partnerships, addressing problems stemming from the (...) conspiracy of courtesy, and optimizing the intersection between online learning and service-learning. (shrink)

Today, an increased impact of information and communication technologies in the society at large has lead teachers to engage in professional development activities related to the use of ICT. Even though this development has been prominent for more than two decades, its long term effects seem complex to determine. This paper is based on interviews with twelve Swedish teachers who participated in a national program for promoting school development and use of ICT in 2000-2001. The program was aligned with the (...) pedagogical approaches set out in the national Swedish curriculum, such as a shift from teaching to learning and giving pupils more responsibility, introducing interdisciplinary approaches to teaching in teams, and a problem based pupils-oriented pedagogy. The analysis of the interviews show that teachers still feel a high degree of appreciation for the program, and that they share a relative agreement of the importance of the program for their teaching with ICT in the last decade. The general intentions of the program to be more concerned with school development and pedagogy rather than technology and ICT seem also to be present today as a long term effect. (shrink)

In the Fall of 2007, ten neuroscientists published a proposal for an interdisciplinary research initiative, the Decade of the Mind, that would focus on four.

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003), the first American to receive a Ph.D. in history of science, was a Harvard undergraduate ('37) and then a Ph.D. student and protégé of George Sarton, founder of Isis and the History of Science Society. He went on to succeed Sarton as editor of Isis (1952–1958) and, later, president of the Society (1961–1962); he was also a president of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. Cohen was an internationally recognized Newton scholar; his (...) interests were encyclopedic, ranging from science and public policy to the history of computers, with several decades as a special consultant for history of computing with IBM. Among his hundreds of publications were such major books as Franklin and Newton (1956), The Birth of a New Physics (1959; rpt., 1985), The Newtonian Revolution (1980), Revolution in Science (1985), Science and the Founding Fathers (1995), Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (1999), and his last book, The Triumph of Numbers (2005), not to mention two jointly authored contributions, the variorum edition and new English translation of Newton's Principia, which will surely still be read a century from now. (shrink)

This article contributes to the understanding of relations between occulture and Decadence in Finnish art at the turn of the twentieth century, focussing on occulture and Decadence in the works of the Finnish artist Oscar Parviainen. The aim is to understand what are the relations between Parviainen's art, the Decadent art movement and occulture, and what are the aspects and cultural phenomena of his time that share similar lines of thought as Parviainen? In which ways did Parviainen address (...) questions of higher truths about human existence, and what kind of role did they play in his thinking? (shrink)

This paper argues that for Nietzsche it is only when the strong type decays on its own terms that it is possible for a weak type to come into dominance by inverting the values of the strong. It sets right a latent inconsistency in Deleuze’s work, Nietzsche and Philosophy , which traces back the origin of decadence to the subterranean struggle between reactive forces. I show that Deleuze’s reading runs contrary to his own contention that for Nietzsche the negative (...) is a result of activity. I argue that the decadence of the strong is a consequence of its very creative activity and abundant health. Relying on Nietzsche’s later works, I isolate and analyze four typical traits of the strong type which not only determine this type as what it is but also make it vulnerable to decadence. (shrink)

The author of this book has traced the major lines of argument over those years in a most engaging style with clear descriptions of the concepts and ideas.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Decade of Teaching Classics in a Massachusetts Prison CHARLES ROWAN BEYE From 1972 until 1982, I volunteered as a teacher in a degree-granting program of liberal arts at the college level in Norfolk State Prison, a medium security prison in Walpole, Massachusetts. Medium security means that the men were not confined to their cells except when there were routine security checks, such as taking attendance which occurred several (...) times a day, or at night when there was a lights-out policy, or whenever the surveillance system of the prison went on alarm. Other than that, the men could work in various shops, or in the prison garden, or, among other things, they could take classes. The men who were incarcerated at Norfolk had been determined not to pose too great a threat to the other inmates, nor to be liable to try to break out in escape attempts that would damage others; the more intractable men were in the maximum security prison down the road, confined to their cells. There had always been shop classes or other kinds of instruction which would train the men into skilled manual labor. I taught in a program that was radically different. It was the dream of an extraordinary woman named Elizabeth Barker who was an old fashioned lefty, a woman of the old money Brahmin class of Boston society, who like so many of her kind had no money any longer, the only indication of her social status being a marbles-in-the-mouth accent, an indifference to money, clothing styles, social distinction, and an arrogance that made her assume that the rest of the world hung on her every word. She was the soul of kindness and generosity, one of the few persons I have met who deserved the accolade of a “true Christian,” although she was insisarion 26.3 winter 2019 tent upon proclaiming her militant atheism. She was also a tremendous bore. I once had the misfortune to drive her back from the prison to Boston. Talking incessantly, in a kind of monotone, relentlessly insisting upon a position that I had agreed with when we started the drive, it was all I could do after a half hour to keep from reaching over, opening the door, and pushing her out. But, God love her, she performed a miracle at Norfolk. Mrs. Barker subscribed to a belief that I soon adopted once I started teaching in her program which was that all people, apart from outright psychopaths, are redeemable, that a teaching relationship offers compassion, instruction, and most of all, a belief in the student, that in itself redeems the student, in this case, the prisoner, from self-hatred, lack of esteem or purpose, and general despair. Conventionally, prisons are run on a mixture of punishment and rehabilitation. At the crudest level you have the concept of solitary confinement, then there is the idea of “at hard labor” where prisoners spend their days breaking rocks under supervision, or as in England at the turn of the century, spending the entire day walking endlessly up a revolving drum with stairs. The lightest so-called punishment is simply the fact of incarceration. The theory is that if you are confined to a prison for so many months, years, the horror of this endurance makes you into a better person because you have had time to realize that you don’t want this to happen again. Relatives of a criminal’s victims are often on hand at parole board hearings because they want the sentence to go on longer, for the prisoner to “suffer more.” Rehabilitation, on the other hand, usually involves teaching skills, on the most basic level, reading and writing, then woodworking, metal work, car repair, on the theory that many males commit crimes because they have no legitimate way to earn money in our economy. Mrs. Barker saw a higher kind of rehabilitation that led into her notion of redemption. The liberal arts, art, music, literature, philosophy, science were in her mind the nourishment of the soul without which no one can truly be said to live. The idea, as you can imag2 a decade of teaching classics in... (shrink)