The earlier Life of Locke, by Lord King, had consisted largely of an assemblage of Locke's own letters and manuscripts, of great value to the historian, but of rather less interest to the student of Locke's philosophy. Fox Bourne's biography, by contrast, concentrates on Locke the philosopher, and seeks to place his philosophical works in the context of his life. Fox Bourne thus describes Locke's studies at Oxford, his distaste for scholasticism, the discovery of Descartes' Meditations, and the role of (...) his medical and scientific interests and of his friendships with Boyle, Sydenham and Newton, in shaping his thought. Although the seeds of the Essay may have been sown as early as 1670, Fox Bourne admits, it was during Locke's exile in Holland between 1683 and 1689, and under the influence of such Dutch friends as Le Clerc, that the great work really took shape. At the heart of the work, we are told, is the critique of revelation that occupies pride of place in Book Four - Locke's overriding concern was to articulate a rationally defensible and universally acceptable version of Christianity. (shrink)

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human (...) history. (shrink)

Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continues to delight its many admirers. In it he writes about his infancy and his schooling in the classics in late Roman North Africa, his remarkable mother, his sexual sins ('Give me chastity, but not yet,' he famously prayed), his time in an outlawed heretical sect, his worldly career and friendships and his gradual return to God. (...) His account of his own eventual conversion is a classic study of anguish, hesitation and what he believes to be God's intervention. It has inspired philosophers, Christian thinkers and monastic followers, but it still leaves readers wondering why exactly Augustine chose to compose a work like none before it. Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine on a brilliantly described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently found letters and sermons by Augustine himself to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustine's heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. For the first time Lane Fox compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves and who illumine Augustine's life and writings by their different choices. More than a decade passed between Augustine's conversion and his beginning the Confessions. Lane Fox argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective, but that they were then written as a single swift composition and that its final books are a coherent consummation of its scriptural meditation and personal biography. This exceptional study reminds us why we are so excited and so moved by Augustine's story. Praise for Pagans and Christians 'This open-hearted and learned book is one that any scholar of the ancient world and of early Christianity would be proud to have written... Lane Fox has opened his pages to let in an entirely new world.' Peter Brown, New York Review of Books 'A work of generous humanity and recondite erudition... of consuming interest to all of us who want to know and understand the consequences of the ancient world.' Henry Chadwick, Financial Times Praise for The Unauthorised Version 'I don't know where one would turn for an account of the Bible so clear, so lively and, in many respects, so just.' Frank Kermode, Guardian 'Magnificent... delivered with authority and verve. Learned but never pedantic, he is an unfailingly incisive, thought-provoking, humane, courteous, and often entertaining guide.' Economist. (shrink)

Tout au long de sa longue carrière, Henri Lecoq a eu une réputation contrastée dans la communauté scientifique. Son oeuvre est citée par Mendel et par Darwin; cependant certains de ses compatriotes, tels qu'Adolphe Brongniart lui ont dénié originalité et profondeur. Dans une certaine mesure, Lecoq a subi le destin de beaucoup de naturalistes provinciaux dont les efforts n'étaient pas vraiment reconnus par les maîtres de la discipline. Mais une explication plus spécifique se trouve peut-être dans l'habitude qu'avait Lecoq d'utiliser (...) dans le même texte différents styles considérés comme incompatibles. Son travail sur l'hybridation végétale est à cet égard significatif: des bribes de vulgarisation hautes en couleurs y côtoient des conseils pratiques pour les horticulteurs, et les descriptions pittoresques s'y mêlent aux réflexions théoriques. Au terme de cette étude, Lecoq apparaît comme un homme de science qui combine un sens aigu de l'observation avec les caractéristiques d'un auteur romantique. (shrink)

This letter responds to the article “On the Authority of Advance Euthanasia Directives for People with Severe Dementia: Reflections on a Dutch Case,” by Henri Wijsbek and Thomas Nys, in the September‐October 2022 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

In his book "Walden", Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) describes an experiment intended to determine what is essential in life. His analysis includes a critique of the excesses of material culture, concluding that the most important concerns for human beings revolve around the retention of what he calls "heat." I suggest that there are a number of interesting parallels between this analysis and a cluster of ideas generally describable as "protodaoist" and often attributed to the legendary and obscure figure known (...) as Yang Zhu or Yangzi. In particular, both of these models can be seen to relate one's efficient preservation of life force to the accomplishment of what I am calling one's "natural destiny," and both include a concomitant critique of material culture. In this essay I will define the concept of natural destiny and articulate and compare the two models' common concern with achieving it through properly economizing one's resources in the face of the diversion provoked by material attachments. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Introduction Henry Somers-Hall; 1. Deleuze and the history of philosophy Daniel W. Smith; 2. Difference and repetition James Williams; 3. The Deleuzian reversal of Platonism Miguel Beistegui; 4. Deleuze and Kant Beth Lord; 5. Phenomenology and metaphysics, and chaos: on the fragility of the event in Deleuze Leonard Lawlor; 6. Deleuze and structuralism François Dosse; 7. Deleuze and Guattari: Guattareuze and Co. Gary Genosko; 8. Nomadic ethics Rosi Braidotti; 9. Deleuze's political philosophy Paul Patton; 10. (...) Deleuze, mathematics, and realist ontology Manuel Delanda; 11. Deleuze and life John Protevi; 12. Gilles Deleuze's aesthetics of sensation Dorothea Olkowski; 13. Deleuze and literature Ronald Bogue; 14. Deleuze and psychoanalysis Eugene Holland; 15. Deleuze's philosophical heritage: unity, difference, and onto-theology Henry Somers-Hall. (shrink)

Schaaf, an independent photohistorian and research professor at the University of Glasgow and the director of the Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project, discusses approximately fifty of Talbot's images in the collection of the Getty Museum."--BOOK JACKET.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) ist vor allem als Erfinder der Fotografie bekannt. Basierend auf umfassenden neuen Quellen wird hier erstmals Talbots Erfindung im Hinblick auf sein Gesamtoeuvre untersucht. Dies ermöglicht neue Interpretationen seiner Fotografien, die die Autorin primär als Hilfsmittel für seine vielfältigen wissenschaftlichen Interessen und somit als Teil eines größeren epistemischen Gedankengebildes versteht.

I argue that while there is no evidence that Roy Holland was influenced by Henri Bergson, their views of morality nevertheless reveal an interesting similarity.

Heinrich Siecke, who Anglicised his name to Henry Sike, was regarded in Northern Europe as one of the most promising scholars of his day. Born in the reformed city of Bremen in 1668, he studied at...

"L'oeuvre d'art est une tentative vers l'unique, elle s'affirme comme un tout, comme un absolu et, en même temps, elle appartient à un système de relations complexes [...]. Elle est matière et elle est esprit, elle est forme et elle est contenu [...]. Elle est créatrice de l'homme, créatrice du monde et elle installe dans l'histoire un ordre qui ne se réduit à rien d'autre." Un Eloge de la main complète ce texte. "La main arrache le toucher à sa passivité (...) réceptive, elle l'organise pour l'expérience et pour l'action [...]. Elle se mesure avec la matière qu'elle métamorphose, avec la forme qu'elle transfigure. Educatrice de l'homme, elle le multiplie dans l'espace et dans le temps." [Source : 4e de couv.]. (shrink)

A selection of his more important writings.

The author argues that our best hope for addressing world problems (from climate change to violence, to poverty) is to teach critical thinking through the study of language and all symbol systems. This means removing disciplinary boundaries so that we can focus more effectively on solving common problems. Human survival also depends upon our critical analysis of electronic media and our wise uses of technology. Critical thinking via all symbol systems is more likely to generate humane actions. Therefore, education—not governments (...) or armies or institutions or private corporations—is our best hope. (shrink)

This Hackett edition, first published in 1981, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the seventh edition as published by Macmillan and Company, Limited. From the forward by John Rawls: In the utilitarian tradition Henry Sidgwick has an important place. His fundamental work, The Methods of Ethics, is the clearest and most accessible formulation of what we may call 'the classical utilitarian doctorine.' This classical doctrine holds that the ultimate moral end of social and individual action is the greatest (...) net sum of the happiness of all sentient beings. Happinesss is specified by the net balance of pleasure over pain, or, as Sidgwick preferred to say, as the net balance of agreeable over disagreeable consciousness.... (shrink)

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns (...) and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. (shrink)

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1899 Edition.

"With its signal distinction between 'intuition' and 'analysis' and its exploration of the different levels of Duration, _An Introduction to Metaphysics_ has had a significant impact on subsequent twentieth century thought. The arts, from post-impressionist painting to the stream of consciousness novel, and philosophies as diverse as pragmatism, process philosophy, and existentialism bear its imprint. Consigned for a while to the margins of philosophy, Bergson’s thought is making its way back to the mainstream. The reissue of this important work comes (...) at an opportune time, and will be welcomed by teachers and scholars alike." --Peter A. Y. Gunter, University of North Texas. (shrink)

Clinical bioethics is big business. There are now hundreds of people who bioethics in community and university hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation and home care settings, and some who play the role of clinical ethics consultant to transplant teams, managed care companies, and genetic testing firms. Still, there is as much speculation about what clinically active bioethicists actually do as there was ten years ago. Various commentators have pondered the need for training standards, credentials, exams, and malpractice insurance for ethicists engaged (...) in clinical consultation. Much of the discussion seems to accept an implicit presumption that all clinical ethics consultation practices look pretty much alike. But is this accurate? What do clinical ethicists do, how and where do they do it, and what kind of clinical ethics is useful in the hospital and in other settings? (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because of the existence of severely defective humans it is commonly held that whatever consideration is due to all humans is also due to many other animals, and that therefore speciesism, or the readiness to prefer the interest of humans to those of other animals, is unjustified. After criticism of this reasoning a ‘naturalised’ speciesism, acknowledging, for example, the affinities between species, is articulated and defended. A key to this defence is the separation of the task of specifying morally (...) significant differences between humans and other animals from the task of justifying the extension of consideration to defective humans. The conclusion is that more traditional vices than speciesism are chiefly to blame for the shabby treatment of animals by humans. (shrink)

The phrase 'beyond historicism' is usually associated with Bielefeld historians like Hans Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, who attempted to turn the study of history into a social science, but a better candidate would be the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who happened to teach as well in Bielefeld during the 1970's and 1980's. Luhmann had little affinity with the project of his colleagues from the history department. He took the opposite view that the social sciences suffered from a naive enlightenment view (...) and should become more history minded. Like the historicists of the early nineteenth century Luhmann was indirectly inspired by the philosophy of Leibniz. Although Luhmann's theory of social systems may seem miles away from the daily interests of most historians, it can be interpreted as an Aufhebung of historicism. This will be demonstrated for two important concepts, the autopoietic system which incorporates the historicist notion of individuality and the concept of second order observation which can be read as an abstract redescription of what historicists meant by the historical method. (shrink)