Similarity and difference, patterns of variation, consistency and coherence: these are the reference points of the philosopher. Understanding experience, exploring ideas through particular instantiations, novel and innovative thinking: these are the reference points of the artist. However, at certain points in the proceedings of our Symposium titled, Next to Nothing: Art as Performance, this characterisation of philosopher and artist respectively might have been construed the other way around. The commentator/philosophers referenced their philosophical interests through the particular examples/instantiations created by the (...) artist and in virtue of which they were then able to engage with novel and innovative thinking. From the artists’ presentations, on the other hand, emerged a series of contrasts within which philosophical and artistic ideas resonated. This interface of philosopher-artist bore witness to the fact that just as art approaches philosophy in providing its own analysis, philosophy approaches art in being a co-creator of art’s meaning. In what follows, we discuss the conception of philosophy-art that emerged from the Symposium, and the methodological minimalism which we employed in order to achieve it. We conclude by drawing out an implication of the Symposium’s achievement which is that a counterpoint to Institutional theories of art may well be the point from which future directions will take hold, if philosophy-art gains traction. (shrink)

Home care is one of the fastest‐growing industries in the United States, providing valuable opportunities for millions of older adults and people with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional settings. Home care workers assist clients with essential activities of daily living, but their wages and working conditions generally fail to reflect the importance of their work. Drawing on the work of Eva Feder Kittay and other care ethicists, we argue that good care involves attending to the needs (...) of another out of a concern for their well‐being. Such care should be standard in the home care system. Yet, because of the pervasive racial, gender, and economic inequalities that the home care industry perpetuates, home care workers and their clients cannot reasonably be expected to care about each other. We endorse reforms aimed at enabling home care workers and their clients to form and maintain professional relationships that cultivate care.. (shrink)

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

1. As indicated in the Acknowledgments, the sourcebook, The Essential Santayana, is the product of the input of a short list of scholars who, give or take a few names, constitute the “Santayana revival” heralded on the back-cover. Martin A. Coleman has acted as the clearing house for their suggestions, while also writing an Introduction, arranging the readings into five general headings, and providing thumb-nail synopses of each of the readings in each category. While all this is a solid (...) contribution on Coleman’s part, the back-cover contains two questionable if not plainly fallacious “advertisements.” The first is the claim that Santayana, along with William James and Josiah Royce, ranks as “one of the founders.. (shrink)

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.

This paper presents a discussion of an apparent inconsistency between Hume's moral theory and his moral evaluations of historical characters in his History of England. While Hume considers enthusiasm to be a religious vice, he praises the characters of some historical enthusiasts, blames others, and regards enthusiasm as having a positive social effect. But according to Hume's moral theory, only a virtue can have positive social effect, or be praiseworthy. The paper refers to the inconsistency between the History and the (...) moral theory as the ‘enthusiasm puzzle’. The paper concludes by explaining the inconsistency as being rooted in a problem with Hume's moral theory. (shrink)

David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779, is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of religion and the most artful instance of philosophical dialogue since the dialogues of Plato. It presents a fictional conversation between a sceptic, an orthodox Christian, and a Newtonian theist concerning evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of nature based on observable features of the world. This new edition presents it together with several of Hume's other, shorter (...) writings about religion, and with brief selections from the work of Pierre Bayle, who influenced both Hume's views on religion and the dialectical style of the Dialogues. The volume is completed by an introduction which sets the Dialogues in its philosophical and historical contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 299-309 [Access article in PDF] Conscious Fiction Mary Clayton Coleman Bard College Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge; 320 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, $24.95 boards, $16.95 paper. Fictional Minds, by Alan Palmer; 275 pp. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, $45.00. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by Dan Lloyd; 357 pp. Cambridge, (...) Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004, $24.95 boards, $14.95 paper. What contributions can fiction make to the representation and investigation of conscious experience? Might fiction help us to develop and advance new theories about the nature of consciousness? And might such theories, in turn, inform our understanding of the process of reading fiction? Three recent volumes—one by English critic and novelist, David Lodge; another by literary theorist, Alan Palmer; and a third by philosopher and (now) novelist, Dan Lloyd—raise these important, genre-bending questions, and they offer challenging if not always convincing answers to them. More generally, these volumes make valuable contributions to the fruitful cross-pollination that has developed between philosophers, scientists, literary theorists, and novelists who are interested in the nature of consciousness.Lodge's new collection of essays is called Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, and like all of the criticism he has written since the late eighties, this volume is intended for a general audience, not for [End Page 299] literary theorists. The title essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is a revised version of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature that Lodge gave at Emory University in 2001, and the other nine essays, all previously published, cover such topics as Howards End; the novels of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis's memoir, Experience; and the relationship between literature and criticism. I will focus on "Consciousness and the Novel."Lodge's thesis in this essay is that novels play an essential role in our exploration of the nature of human consciousness. This thesis is certainly true, but it is also entirely banal. Much more interesting is what Lodge says in support of it. He argues that because of the unique representative possibilities of the novel, conscious experiences can be represented more effectively in novels than they can be in scientific writing. Taken literally, as an assertion about the relative representational power of novels and scientific discourse, this is extremely implausible. However, taken more loosely—as an invitation to those of us interested in consciousness to take a closer look at the ways conscious experiences are represented in novels—Lodge's claim is sensible and appealing. I will consider the literal reading of Lodge's claim first and then turn to the looser one.It is undoubtedly true that, as a whole, novelists devote more energy to representing conscious experiences than writers of scientific discourse do. However, science writers can use whatever techniques best serve their aims, including the aim of describing conscious experiences, so there is no reason to think that conscious experiences can, in principle, be represented more effectively in novels than in broadly scientific discourse. Given that Lodge discusses such creative science writers as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker in the course of his essay, it is surprising and disappointing to find him caricature scientific writing in the following way: "science... is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper... it would be edited out" (p. 11). Qualia are the supposedly subjective qualitative aspects of conscious experiences. How the plucked string of a cello sounds to you; how the rotting fish in the garbage smells to you; and how it feels for you to inch down into the smooth, almost-too-hot water of a perfect bubble bath—these are all (supposedly) examples of qualia. Lodge is simply mistaken when he says that there is no hint of qualia in scientific writing. There is no consensus about whether qualia can be explained scientifically. In fact, there is no consensus about whether they exist. [End Page... (shrink)

What should advocates of phenomenal intentionality say about unconscious intentional states? I approach this question by focusing on a recent debate between Tim Crane and David Pitt, about the nature of belief. Crane argues that beliefs are never conscious. Pitt, concerned that the phenomenal intentionality thesis coupled with a commitment to beliefs as essentially unconscious embroils Crane in positing unconscious phenomenology, counter-argues that beliefs are essentially conscious. I examine and rebut Crane’s arguments for the essential unconsciousness of beliefs, some (...) of which are widely endorsed. On the way I sketch a model of how belief states could participate in the stream of consciousness. I then consider Pitt’s position, arguing in reply, along Freudian lines, that we should posit not just dispositional but occurrent unconscious beliefs. This result, I argue, indeed requires advocates of phenomenal intentionality to posit unconscious qualia to fix these unconscious occurrent thoughts, and I defend the coherence of the notion of unconscious qualia against some common attacks. Ultimately, I claim, the combination of taking seriously the occurrent unconscious, and a commitment to phenomenal intentionality, should lead us to expand William James’s conception of the stream of consciousness to encompass, additionally, a stream of unconscious mental life—or, perhaps better, to posit a single partly conscious partly unconscious qualia-stream of mental goings-on. (shrink)

Over many years and in many publications David Rosenthal has developed, defended and applied his justly well-known higher-order thought theory of consciousness.2 In this paper I explain the theory, then provide a brief history of a major objection to it. I suggest that this objection is ultimately ineffectual, but that behind it lies a reason to look beyond Rosenthal's theory to another sort of HOT theory. I then offer my own HOT theory as a suitable alternative, before concluding in (...) a final section. Resumo Durante muitos anos, e em muitas publicações, David Rosenthal desenvolveu, defendeu e aplicou sua justamente reconhecida teoria da consciência, intitulada high-order thought. Neste artigo, explico a teoria e, em seguida, forneço uma breve história de uma objeção maior feita a ela. Sugiro que essa objeção é, em última análise, ineficaz, mas que por trás disso há uma razão para olhar além da teoria de Rosenthal, para outro tipo de teoria HOT. Então ofereço minha própria teoria HOT como uma alternativa adequada, antes de concluir, em uma seção final, a respeito de questões filosóficas aqui envolvidas. (shrink)

David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779, is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of religion and the most artful instance of philosophical dialogue since the dialogues of Plato. It presents a fictional conversation between a sceptic, an orthodox Christian, and a Newtonian theist concerning evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of nature based on observable features of the world. This edition presents it together with several of Hume's other, shorter writings (...) about religion, and with brief selections from the work of Pierre Bayle, who influenced both Hume's views on religion and the dialectical style of the Dialogues. The volume is completed by an introduction which sets the Dialogues in its philosophical and historical contexts. (shrink)

The Ethics and Regulation of Research with Human Subjects, edited by Professors Carl Coleman of Seton Hall, Jerry Menikoff of the University of Kansas, Jesse Goldner of Saint Louis University, and Nancy Dubler of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is an up-to-date and authoritative collection of readings on ethical, legal, and policy issues in research with human subjects. The authors have modeled their text on the casebook style commonly used in law schools. At 746 pages, plus front matter (...) and an appendix, this book contains just about everything one needs to know for a thorough grasp on human subjects research, including federal and state regulations governing this research, interpretive guidance from federal agencies, international guidelines and codes, court decisions, historical documents and case studies, and selected readings from scholarly articles and books. The book includes written comments and questions to help students understand and interpret the readings. (shrink)

The first three essays by John Biro, Alexander Rosenberg, and Robert Fogelin, respectively, focus on Hume's project to develop a science of human nature that would provide a foundation for all other sciences. Biro shows that what unites Hume's science of human nature and twentieth-century cognitive sciences is their mutual commitment to explain the mind as one would any other natural phenomenon. Rosenberg traces Hume's influence on the development of philosophy of science to show how he came to be regarded (...) as the most important philosopher to have written in English. Fogelin characterizes Hume, at least with regard to his criticism of our intellectual capacities, as a "radical, unreserved, unmitigated sceptic". Though acknowledging Hume's constructive idea that nonrational aspects of our nature render these skeptical conclusions inconsequential, he stresses that this too "is a sceptical conclusion", a view endorsed by David Norton, whose introduction to the volume argues that Hume is a "post-sceptical" philosopher who "consciously developed a philosophical position that is at one and the same time fundamentally sceptical and fundamentally constructive". Addressing Hume's application of his science of human nature to religion, J. C. A. Gaskin's essay perspicaciously outlines his criticism of the design argument, his argument against the believability of miracles, and his account of the merits of secular morality over religious morality. The final section of Gaskin's essay convincingly refutes attempts to show Hume is a fideist or to find a justification of faith in his theory of natural belief. (shrink)

I begin by discussing an objection often lodged against higher-order theories of consciousness. The objection is that those theories do not preclude consciousness from misrepresenting the mental properties of our conscious states. I argue that there are several reasons why this objection cannot succeed. Sam Coleman agrees that the objection fails, but sees it as pointing to a related objection, which he argues poses difficulties the higher-order theorist cannot avoid. His solution is a variant theory of consciousness that invokes (...) mental quotation in the content of a higher-order awareness. I’ll argue that mental quotation cannot be understood in any way that helps with the objection. I’ll argue also that the objection Coleman articulates is question begging, since it in effect simply channels a first-order approach to consciousness, and has no independent basis apart from that. Resumo: Começo por discutir uma objeção muitas vezes apresentada contra as teorias da consciência de ordem superior. A objeção é que essas teorias não impedem a consciência de representar de modo errôneo as propriedades mentais de nossos estados conscientes. Eu argumento que existem várias razões pelas quais essa objeção não pode ter sucesso. Sam Coleman concorda que a objeção falha, mas a vê como apontando para uma objeção relacionada, que ele argumenta apresentar dificuldades que o teórico do pensamento de ordem superior não pode evitar. Sua solução é uma variante desta teoria, que invoca a “citação mental” como conteúdo da consciência de ordem superior. Eu argumentarei que a citação mental não pode ser entendida de alguma forma que satisfaça tal objeção. Argumentarei também que a objeção que Coleman articula incorre em petição de princípio, uma vez que, na prática, ela simplesmente escolhe uma abordagem de primeira ordem para a consciência, e não tem nenhuma justificativa independente para isso. (shrink)

In the range of his intellectual interests and the profundity of his mathematical thought Hermann Weyl towered above his contemporaries, many of whom viewed him with awe. This volume, the most ambitious study to date of Weyl's singular contributions to mathematics, physics, and philosophy, looks at the man and his work from a variety of perspectives, though its gaze remains fairly steadily fixed on Weyl the geometer and space‐time theorist. Structurally, the book falls into two parts, described in the general (...) introduction by the editor: Part 1 contains four essays on particular aspects of Weyl's work, highlighting ideas he developed in various editions of his classic Raum‐Zeit‐Materie. Part 2 presents a lengthy study by Robert Coleman and Herbert Korté covering nearly the whole gamut of Weyl's mathematical research, an impressive feat. Both in the introduction as well as in footnotes to the articles Erhard Scholz's editorial voice chimes in discreetly, helping tie all five studies together.Coleman and Korté begin chronologically with Weyl's early work in analysis and the modern theory of Riemann surfaces before turning to differential geometry, unified field theory, and the space problem, a topic they use as a springboard for a discussion of their own recent work on the foundations of space‐time. They then take up Weyl's shift to group representation theory and its applications to quantum mechanics, ending with his much earlier research on the structure of the continuum. All of these topics are well handled, but the authors' own agendas coupled with their penchant for overlooking chronology in order to package Weyl's work into neat little bundles leave one feeling rather stranded and far removed from the sources of Weyl's inspiration. Moreover, the narrative style makes this part of the volume read like a technical appendix, albeit a most informative one. Readers who tackle Scholz's far more contextualized essay will be amply rewarded by comparing his views with the opinions set forth by Coleman and Korté in Part 2.Scholz gives a masterful account of Weyl's intellectual journeys from 1917 to 1925 in a study that serves as a fulcrum for the entire volume. Drawing on a number of recently published studies, including his own, on the interplay between mathematics and physics inspired by Einstein's theory of general relativity, Scholz describes how Weyl responded to this challenge by developing a truly infinitesimal space‐time geometry that generalized classical Riemannian geometry. Although unconvinced by Einstein's critique of his unified field theory, Weyl shifted his focus from this realm to the classical space problem, analyzed earlier with more primitive techniques by Hermann Helmholtz and Sophus Lie. In this connection, it should be mentioned that Thomas Hawkins has given a probing analysis of Weyl's related work on the representation of Lie groups in his tour‐de‐force work, Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups . Scholz argues that Weyl's struggle to tame his modernized version of the space problem stemmed from a deep‐seated belief in his geometrical ideas, which in turn were nourished by philosophical musings. By demonstrating the closely related conceptual links that motivated Weyl's research in infinitesimal geometry, space‐time physics, and the foundations of mathematics, Scholz nicely illuminates the underlying fabric of epistemological concerns that occupied Weyl's attention during this fertile period.The three remaining essays in Part 1 focus on other aspects of Weyl's work in mathematical physics and cosmology. Skuli Sigurdsson's “Journeys in Spacetime” offers a broad interpretation of Weyl's career, one that emphasizes Weyl's sensitivity to cultural tensions as reflected in his philosophical roots, which combined phenomenology with facets of German idealism. Shaken by the annihilation of cultural values in Nazi Germany, Weyl became deeply aware of the gulf that separated his earlier life in Göttingen and Zurich from the one he took up at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1933. He tried to adapt, but felt out of place in an Anglo‐American scientific culture openly hostile toward metaphysics and speculative philosophy. Sigurdsson stresses these tensions, contrasting the introspective, creative individual against the backdrop of the collective in the age of the machine, but without spelling out which collective were most important for him. Wolfgang Pauli thought he knew and, like Einstein before him, he had no compunction about bluntly telling Weyl he was a mathematician, not a physicist.Pauli's opinions notwithstanding, Weyl did far more than just dabble around the mathematical edges of the new physics. If Coleman and Korté perhaps press their case for his visionary accomplishments too far, Norbert Straumann's essay “Ursprünge der Eichtheorien” suggests why Weyl's reputation among physicists has risen steadily ever since the advent of Yang‐Mills theory in the 1950s. In the course of describing Weyl's adaptation of his gauge transformation formalism to Dirac's electron theory, Straumann sheds considerable light on Pauli's role as self‐appointed watchman guarding the disciplinary boundary that separated theoretical physics from physical mathematics . He further suggests that disciplinary jealousy was a major reason why Pauli dismissed Weyl's two‐component formalism for spinors out of hand.In the realm of cosmology, on the other hand, Weyl's work has long since passed into the dustbins of history, as Hubert Goenner remarks in recounting a fascinating chapter in the infancy of space‐time physics. While doing so, Goenner shows how initially Weyl almost slavishly adopted what Einstein called Mach's principle, which asserts that the metric structure of space‐time is solely determined by the distribution of matter in the universe. This notion was quickly challenged by Willem De Sitter, who showed that Einstein's matter‐free field equations admitted a global solution with non‐zero constant curvature. Both Einstein and Weyl tried to argue that invisible masses must be present just over the “spatial horizon” of De Sitter's world in order to account for its curvature. Goenner meticulously analyzes the physical and mathematical issues at stake in this debate, stressing how Weyl gradually moved away from a strong physical interpretation to one in which mathematics models rather than physics models simply reveal natural phenomena. He argues further that Weyl's cosmological principle arose as the final expression of his search for a deeper physical meaning.Given the quality of these essays, it is regrettable that this book contains so little about Weyl's professional career, a weakness the editor could have redressed at least partially in his general introduction. This omission is all the more unfortunate given the dearth of readily accessible information about Weyl's life available elsewhere. For however mundane his outward existence may have been, the reader cannot be expected to appreciate the interplay between the world Weyl knew and his creative responses to it without fairly detailed knowledge of his biography. Shorn from these contexts, it becomes difficult to form a flesh‐and‐blood image of Weyl beyond the cliché‐ridden stereotype that sees him as a “heroic thinker in the grand German tradition.” While none of the authors falls into this trap, the collective impression they leave suggests a most enigmatic figure. Either Weyl the man tends to get lost in the shadows of his collected scientific output or he appears as a mystic loner, an outcast who abhorred the machine age in which he lived. Closer attention to the people in his life would no doubt produce a very different picture of the man and his interests. This major lacuna notwithstanding, the present volume will surely remain an indispensable resource for any future investigations of Weyl's staggering intellectual achievements. (shrink)

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, her retheorization of power in the current conditions of late liberalism, and the situation of the inhuman within philosophical and anthropological economies. Povinelli describes a mode of power that she calls geontopower, which operates through the governance of Life and Nonlife. The interview is accompanied by a (...) brief contextualizing introduction. (shrink)

These essays by leading scholars illustrate the complexity and range of philosophical issues raised by consideration of law and social justice. The contributors to Law and Social Justice examine such broad foundational issues as instrumentalist versus Kantian conceptions of rights as well as such specific problems as the admissibility or inadmissibility of evidence of causation in toxic tort cases. They consider a variety of subjects, including the implications of deliberative democracy for privacy rights, equality as a principle of distributive justice, (...) the paradox of "moral luck," the treatment of intellectual property in China and its roots in Chinese tradition, and the extent to which initial acquisition of goods yields full property rights. Two special sections at the end of the volume discuss the treatment of law and social justice issues in the work of two philosophers: "Wittgenstein and Legal Theory," on the influence of Wittgenstein's thought on legal philosophy, and a discussion of Jules L. Coleman's The Practice of Principle, which concludes with a contribution, "Facts, Fictions, and the Grounds of Law," by Coleman himself. (shrink)

This book presents the first systematic typological analysis of applicatives across African, American Indian, and East Asian languages. It is also the first to address their functions in discourse, the derivation of their semantic and syntactic properties, and how and why they have changed over time.Applicative constructions are typically described as transitivizing because they allow an intransitive base verb to have a direct object. The term originates from the seventeenth-century missionary grammars of Uto-Aztecan languages. Constructions designated as prepositional, benefactive, and (...) instrumental may refer to the same or similar phenomena. Applicative constructions have been deployed in the development of a range of syntactic theories which have then often been used to explain their functions, usually within the context of Bantu languages. Dr Peterson provides a wealth of cross-linguistic information on discourse-functional, diachronic, and typological aspects of applicative constructions. He documents their unexpected synchronic variety and the diversity of diachronic sources about them. He argues that many standard assumptions about applicatives are unfounded, and provides a clear guide for future language-specific and cross-linguistic research and analysis. (shrink)

Any realist interpretation of quantum theory must grapple with the measurement problem and the status of state-vector collapse. In a no-collapse approach, measurement is typically modeled as a dynamical process involving decoherence. We describe how the minimal modal interpretation closes a gap in this dynamical description, leading to a complete and consistent resolution to the measurement problem and an effective form of state collapse. Our interpretation also provides insight into the indivisible nature of measurement—the fact that you can't stop a (...) measurement part-way through and uncover the underlying 'ontic' dynamics of the system in question. Having discussed the hidden dynamics of a system's ontic state during measurement, we turn to more general forms of open-system dynamics and explore the extent to which the details of the underlying ontic behavior of a system can be described. We construct a space of ontic trajectories and describe obstructions to defining a probability measure on this space. (shrink)

This book provides a conceptual basis for recognizing the classroom as an ecology of linguistic and cultural patterns that should be taken into account as part of the teacher's professional decision making. It argues that the orchestration of classroom behaviour cannot be separated from the mental ecology of metaphor and thought patterns that reflect the student's primary culture. Chapters discuss the metaphorical nature of language and thought, primary socilization, nonverbal communication, framing and social control, the classroom as an ecology of (...) power, culturally responsive supervision, and educating teachers for the 21st century - all from a cultural and linguistic point of view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Works of George Santayana, volume IX, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion ed. by Martin A. Coleman, David E. Spiech, and Faedra Lazar WeissKrzysztof (Chris) Piotr SkowrońskiEdited by Martin A. Coleman, David E. Spiech, and Faedra Lazar WeissThe Works of George Santayana, volume IX, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The MIT Press, 2023; 359 pp., (...) incl.indexIt is not merely a re-edition of Santayana’s book that is at stake here. This ninth volume of The MIT Critical Edition of The Works of George Santayana is a next step in showing us his vast output with extensive range, depth, and, most importantly, significant stimulation for our generation of scholars and non-scholars. Just to illustrate the scope of Santayana’s work: volume V of the present MIT Critical Edition, published in the years 2001–2008, consists of eight thick books with Santayana’s correspondence throughout seventy years of intellectual activity (around 3000 letters to roughly 350 recipients, William James, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, Sidney Hook, Horace Kallen, B.A.G. Fuller, Hugo Münsterberg, among them), containing philosophical and cultural insights that substantially compliment the views he expressed in his published texts.The original idea of the MIT Critical Edition was to present the published and unpublished works, followed by an elaborate editorial apparatus. As we can read in the present volume, “The goal of the editors is to produce texts that accurately represent Santayana’s final intentions regarding his works while recording all evidence on which editorial decisions have been based” (p. 307). How complex and fascinating the whole project has been we can also learn from a recently published book by Herman Saatkamp, who edited the Santayana edition for twenty-six years (Charles Padrón and Chris Skowroński, eds., Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., A Life of Scholarship with George Santayana: [End Page 462] Essays and Reflections, Brill/Rodopi, 2021). As we can read in Saatkamp’s book (p. 139), the story goes back to 1976, when John Lachs, top Santayana expert, asked Saatkamp to write the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and put forward a proposal for The Works of George Santayana. As the latest of its results today, we have the ninth volume just published, while future volumes are still being prepared for publication (twenty volumes are currently projected).More specific answers to questions: Do we need a critical edition to do this? Is it not enough just to publish the original volume anew? depend largely on the target audience. For those who are unfamiliar with Santayana, having in hand Volume IX shows that it is just a part, although an important part, of a much larger project, and Paul Forster’s lengthy introduction would be very helpful. Forster competently outlines Santayana’s work and life, and subsequently analyzes the book, chapter by chapter, so that we have a penetrating insight into its whole substance. Also, further down in the volume (pp. 303–306), we find a “Chronology of the Life and Work of George Santayana” that is informative to those unfamiliar with Santayana.I suspect that those audiences who are familiar with Santayana have been waiting for this volume impatiently. The original 1913 publication, by Charles Scribner’s Son (New York)—which itself was a collection of rather independent texts in the form of chapters—has been expanded with Santayana’s preface to the second edition, of 1926. Most importantly, however, the whole text (these two editions: 1913 and 1926) have been re-edited, revised, and corrected according to the criteria of a critical edition. Some terms, phrases, names, as well as other issues are explained extensively in a 140-page part entitled “Notes to the Text” (pp. 159–302). Some of these notes are instructive indeed, not only because they explain passages in the text, but also because they refer to other works by Santayana where he explains the issue at hand into more detail or from a different viewpoint. From these notes we learn much more about the ideas discussed and the figures to which Santayana refers in his reflections than we would by reading... (shrink)

Climate change and justice are so closely associated that many people take it for granted that a global climate treaty should--indeed, must--directly address both issues together. But, in fact, this would be a serious mistake, one that, by dooming effective international limits on greenhouse gases, would actually make the world's poor and developing nations far worse off. This is the provocative and original argument of Climate Change Justice. Eric Posner and David Weisbach strongly favor both a climate change agreement (...) and efforts to improve economic justice. But they make a powerful case that the best--and possibly only--way to get an effective climate treaty is to exclude measures designed to redistribute wealth or address historical wrongs against underdeveloped countries. In clear language, Climate Change Justice proposes four basic principles for designing the only kind of climate treaty that will work--a forward-looking agreement that requires every country to make greenhouse--gas reductions but still makes every country better off in its own view. This kind of treaty has the best chance of actually controlling climate change and improving the welfare of people around the world. (shrink)

Broad in scope and edited by two massive names in geography, this is a critical exploration of how the field has emerged and fared over the course of its modern institutionalization.

Seventeen essays on the ways racism and sexism have intersected and buttressed each other in the United States. They include: "I just see people"--exercises in learning the effects of racism and sexism; conjuring race; reflections on the meaning of white; changing the subject--studies in the appropriation of pain; hard-to- handle anger; and the problem of speaking for others. Paper edition, $22.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Western Marxism, since its Western deviation and theoretical development in the 1920s, developed in diverse ways that has reflected the broader philosophical environment. First, a theory of conscio...

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines. The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people (...) reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations that we refer to as undoing, a family of effects that derive from the claim that intervened-on variables become independent of their normal causes. Six studies support the prediction for causal arguments but not consistently for parallel conditional ones. Two of the studies show that effects are treated as diagnostic when their values are observed but nondiagnostic when they are intervened on. These results cannot be explained by theories that do not distinguish interventions from other sorts of events. (shrink)

Mammalian sperm undergo discharge of a single, anterior secretory granule following their attachment to the zona pellucida surrounding the oocyte. This secretory discharge is known for historical reasons as the acrosome reaction. It fulfils a number of purposes and without it, sperm are unable to penetrate the zona pellucida and fuse with the oocyte. In this review, we focus on the role of the acrosome reaction in the development of fusion competence in sperm. Any naturally occurring membrane fusion has two (...) major sequential steps: a docking or adhesion step, in which two membranes adhere, and a fusion step, in which their lipid bilayers are destabilized and merged and a cellular compartment is either created or destroyed. Recent evidence suggests that there is an important role for oocyte integrins and sperm‐bound disintegrins in mammalian sperm/oocyte adhesion and fusion. The fusion mechanism employed by sperm remains poorly understood, however, and circumstantial evidence suggests it is more complex than the interaction between a single protein species and its target. Sperm/oocyte fusion is probably the most accessible eukaryotic model for intercellular fusion currently available, partly because it is temporally separated from gene expression. Elucidation of the mechanism of sperm/oocyte fusion may throw light on the mechanism of other intercellular fusions such as myoblast fusion, and the evolutionary relationship of intercellular membrane fusion to intracellular membrane fusion. (shrink)

This book is a series of essays by distinguished scholars concerned with the improvement of primary, secondary, and tertiary studies, most especially in arts but also in mathematics and science. It is concerned with past ideas about education in Australia, most particularly with the traditions that have yielded an education that has proven most beneficial to Australia in terms of comparison with other countries; and it advocates and emphasises how this tradition can be maintained and improved in specific ways. Essays (...) focus on primary and secondary education in music, and art, mathematics, history and the classics, on the improvement of memory and vocabulary, but more particularly on university education, discussing the purpose of education, learning in general, the use of the seminar, the necessity of freedom of debate, the inadequacies and contradictions of French and Anglo-post modernism, the teaching of history, of philosophy, and its branch aesthetics, mathematics, equality in education, teaching at university and funding of the whole enterprise. The authors are all well known in their disciplines and some are experts, internationally recognised in their fields. This book features essays by: David Daintree, Karl Schmude, Simon Haines, Kevin Donnelly, Matthew Lesh, Chris Berg & Bella d'Abrera, David Furse-Roberts, Greg Melleuish, Steven Schwartz, Blaise Joseph, James Franklin, Christopher Allen, Richard Gill, Jeremy Bell, Barry Spurr, David Brooks, Natalie Kennedy, Sarah Williams, Sarah Lawrence, Ivan Francis Head. (shrink)

This article surveys the latest research on risky-choice framing effects, focusing on the implications for rational decision-making. An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or ‘framed’. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options specify the number of people who will be saved or the corresponding number who will die. It is standardly assumed (...) that such responses violate a foundational tenet of rational decision-making, known as the principle of description invariance. We discuss recent theoretical and empirical research that challenges the dominant ‘irrationalist’ narrative. These approaches typically pay close attention to how decision-makers represent decision problems (including their interpretation of numerical quantifiers or predicate choice) and they highlight the need for a more robust characterization of the description invariance principle. We conclude by indicating avenues for future research that could bring us closer to a complete—and potentially rationalizing—explanation of framing effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Experience and Education:Themes and QuestionsDeborah Kerdeman"Being with" music. Attentive responsiveness in teaching. Scholarly learning as engagement with beauty. Three evocative images of aesthetic experience come to light in the essays by Custodero, Hansen, and Neumann. From the musical play of children conducting imaginary orchestras to the vocational aspirations of adults who gaze through telescopes or study paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, aesthetic experience spans a range of activities (...) and ages. No matter the setting or moment, aesthetic experience vitalizes our lives with meaning and joy. Why this is so and what difference this makes for education emerge as overarching concerns in this set of papers. Addressing these issues, the authors articulate a number of commonthemes and reach similar conclusions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience.I want to identify and analyze key ideas that run throughout these essays. Doing so deepens our appreciation of the authors' insights and underscores the importance of the project they undertake. I also want to examine three questions that the essays suggest but do not develop. Exploring these questions, I hope to further enrich our understanding of aesthetic experience and its place in education.First and foremost, aesthetic experience for all three authors integrates multiple ways of knowing and enables individuals to perceive connections that they might otherwise overlook. According to Custodero, aesthetic experience harmonizes imagination, physicality, and "thinking-in-action." [End Page 88] Thinking-in-action, Custodero says, while "critical and consequential," is nonverbal and nonjudgmental — unifying rather than analytic. Synthesizing bodily movement, imagination, and thought, aesthetic experience reveals "surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena." The theme of integration is echoed in Neumann's description of scholarly learning as aesthetic experience. Scholarly learning does not shun feeling or lived experience, Neumann writes. This way of knowing instead is "deeply emotional and personal." Insight fuses with emotion, enabling scholars to "feel the whole picture," as David the astronomer puts it in his interview with Neumann. For Hansen, aesthetic experience connotes heightened perception, a way of being that attends to nuances of gesture that would otherwise remain invisible. "The aesthetic highlights aspects of wonder and of beauty that emerge, spontaneously and unrehearsed," Hansen explains. A form of creativity, aesthetic perception combines with moral and intellectual understanding to fully embrace "the living dynamic gestalt" of teaching and learning.Aesthetic experience thus integrates mind, body, and emotion. Hansen links aesthetic experience to moral judgment as well. Integrating various ways of knowing, aesthetic experience enables individuals to perceive and understand relationships that pulse throughout the social and natural world. Such understanding is pleasurable, the authors agree.Aesthetic experience not only is integrative. It also is interactive. Custodero's musicians interact with instruments, musical scores, and other individuals. Neumann's scholars interact with ideas and scholarly materials. Hansen's preservice teachers interact with works of art, subject matter, students, and one another. Interacting with people and things, individuals become absorbed in what they are doing. "Being with" music is howCustodero puts it. Carmen, the professor of music in Neumann's essay, says that playing music well "is like a complete focus of oneness."Being absorbed in aesthetic interaction does not discount or dissolve the ability to make decisions or direct action. Aesthetic experience rather presumes and promotes "aesthetic agency," to borrow a phrase from Custodero. "To 'be in the moment,'" Custodero writes, "is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital." Hansen's description of aesthetic perception combines attentiveness and responsiveness in a "dynamic combination of patience, listening, and initiative." Neumann states that scholarly learning is an experience of "deep engrossment." Such engrossment does not extinguish the self, however. In the words of David the astronomer, feeling "the whole picture... is a combination of both what you see, sort of an instinctive or primal thing, and also your knowledge of what, you know, you put together." [End Page 89]The interactive nature of aesthetic experience thus signifies a kind of "agency-in-situ." Aesthetic experience is shaped or directed by the contribution and initiative of individuals. But individuals cannot act in advance of experience or know what to do, unless they are... (shrink)

Recipient of Choice Magazine's 1996 Outstanding Academic Book Award Author Raymond Morrow outlines and recounts the development of the major tenets of critical theory, exemplifying them through the works of two of their most influential, recent adherents: Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens. Beginning with a comprehensive yet meticulous explication of critical theory and its history, the author next discusses it within the context of a research program; his work concludes with an examination of empirical methods. Emphasizing the connections between critical (...) theory, empirical research, and social science methodology, Morrow's volume offers refreshing insights on traditional and current material. (shrink)

Epithelia can be defined morphologically as tissues that line surfaces, and ultrastructurally with reference to their cells' apico‐basal polarity and possession of specific cell‐cell junctions. Defining the epithelial phenotype at a molecular level is more problematic ‐ while it is easy to name proteins (e.g. keratins) expressed by a “typical” epithelium, no known molecules are expressed by every epithelium but by no other tissues. Cells can differentiate to and from the epithelial state as part of normal development, as a response (...) to disease or when manipulated in culture. Many factors (matrix components, adhesion molecules, growth factors, transcription factors) have been identified that can trigger these transitions of phenotype in specific cases, but to date no general master regulators of the epithelial state have been found. The epithelial state may therefore be controlled by multiple regulatory genes so that there is no single molecule responsible for all of the diverse types of epithelium that exist in higher animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 2, November 2003, pp. 223-266 A Diplomatic Transcription of Hume's "volunteer pamphlet" for Archibald Stewart: Political Whigs, Religious Whigs, and Jacobites M. A. BOX, DAVID HARVEY, AND MICHAEL SILVERTHORNE Many scholars interested in David Hume will have encountered his defense of the beleaguered Archibald Stewart as it appears in an appendix in John Valdimir Price's The Ironic Hume (Austin: University of Texas (...) Press, 1965). Additionally they might know of Price's discussion for The Biblioteck of 1973 of a copy with manuscript markings. A reason for revisiting this pamphlet is that the National Library of Scotland has graciously given permission to reproduce a copy (shelfmark NE.10.e.4) featuring a preface and significant markings in manuscript not in the copy that Price reproduced in his book. As Hume assumes considerable familiarity with the events to which he alludes, we have annotated the text to make it fully intelligible to readers two and half centuries after its composition. The rudimentary bibliographic facts and mysteries are as follows. Two editions survive to us, an octavo (in fours) and a rare duodecimo. Although there is no reason to regard the duodecimo as a second edition correcting or augmenting a first edition, it probably was manufactured after, and was textually derivative from, the octavo. We know nothing of the publishing of M. A. Box is Associate Professor of English, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, PO Box 755720, Fairbanks, AK 99775-5720, USA. David Harvey is at the Classics Department, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, Queen's Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK. Michael Silverthorne is Associate Professor of History, McGiIl University, Stephen Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal H3A 2T7, Canada, e-mail: [email protected] 224 M. A. Box, David Harvey, and Michael Silverthorne the duodecimo, and doubtless that is as its producers intended. Its title page indicates, like that of the octavo, that the printing was done "for M. Cooper" in 1748, but William Strahan's ledgers register the printing in December 1747 of only the octavo in an edition of 1000 copies.1 The job is listed under bookseller Andrew Millar's account, not Mary Cooper's, probably for the reason that Cooper was a front whose role was to screen the true producers. It is possible that Millar hired someone other than Strahan to print the duodecimo, but it is also possible that someone other than Millar had it printed to mimic the octavo and take the opportunity it offered for concealment.2 A different editorial judgment is evinced in the duodecimo in that cosmetic measures are taken in it to obscure the identities of two military men ridiculed. For example, "Fowke" is rendered as "F—" and "John Cope" as "J-C-----." A digression on Mary Cooper is in order. This remarkable woman (died 1761) took over her husband Thomas's business upon his death 9 February 1743. That business had a history of "publishing" pamphlets and therefore made a plausible front for Millar, who in at least thirty-six other instances, none requiring courage, was willing to have his name appear on a title page with "M. Cooper." (This figure derives from a search by imprints using the English Short-Title Catalogue.) Until Thomas Cooper died, his name appeared on editions of John Armstrong's The Oeconomy of Love (1736 and thereafter) though only Millar's name is listed in the Stationers' Register (Foxon, English Verse A303-A311), and Mary's name is on the title page of the 1753 edition for which Strahan charged Millar (Strahan Papers, Add. MS 48800, s.v. August 1753). It was perhaps in this pattern that the second edition of Hume's heterodox Philosophical Essays (1750) would be reissued in 1751 with a new title page replacing Millar's name with Cooper's. That book was made temporarily a more alarming property by the superstitious panic of the London populace following the winter earthquakes in 1750, presaged by a bloody cloud. Within that year Bishop Thomas Sherlock caused a stir with a pastoral letter (A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London) blaming the earthquakes on several iniquities, "particularly heretical books" (Walpole, Correspondence 20... (shrink)