This dissertation includes an introduction, five main chapters, and a conclusion. In the chapter “The Definition of Change”, I expound Aquinas’ account of change. I maintain that Aquinas’ account is meant to describe both spiritual and material changes. Hence, the hylomorphic account of change as the passage from form-less matter to enformed matter is unable to describe all changes. Contrary to Brower, I suggest that Aquinas’ favorite model involves a passage from potentiality to actuality. In addition, I state that ‘change’ (...) is identical to the second potentiality/first actuality of a process that includes three steps, a first potentiality, a second potentiality, and a second actuality. In the chapter on “Aquinas, Presentism, and Adverbialism”, I analyze the semantics of propositions that describe changing processes. I maintain that Aquinas subscribed to the view that past and future tense statements can have a truth-value. Chapter 4 is devoted to the so-called principle of plenitude, i.e. the thesis that all possibilities are realized at some point in the future. Aquinas is believed to have subscribed to the principle, whereas Aristotle’s texts are much more disputed. In this chapter, I offer a new interpretation, according to which Aristotle accepted a restricted version of the principle of plenitude, but Aquinas rejected the principle in all its formulations. In chapter 5 “Aquinas on Future Contingents”, I expound Aquinas’ theory of future contingents events. In this chapter, I make two claims. I state that Aquinas’ theory entails that future events do not exist, according to the ‘actual’ sense of existence. My second claim is about the logic of future contingents. I claim that Aquinas’ argument is logically sound, but presupposes that the so-called K-formula is not a tautology of Aquinas’ modal system. In chapter 6 I expound Aquinas’ definition of time. I maintain that Aquinas’ definition is not circular and time is distinct in both definition and in essendo from change. I conclude by stating that time has extra-mental existence. (shrink)

Abstract.Russell Stannard distinguishes between objective time as measured in theoretical physics and subjective time, or time as experienced by human beings in normal consciousness. Because objective time, or four‐dimensional space‐time for the physicist, does not change but exists all at once, Stannard argues that this is presumably how God views time from eternity which is beyond time. We human beings are limited to experiencing the moments of time successively and thus cannot know (...) the future as already existing in the same way that God does. I argue that Stannard is basically correct in his theological assumptions about God's understanding of time but that his explanation would be more persuasive within the context of a neo‐Whiteheadian metaphysics. The key points in that metaphysics are (1) that creation is contained within the structured field of activity proper to the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and (2) that the spontaneous decisions of creatures are continually ordered and reordered into an ever‐expanding totality already known in its fullness by the divine persons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Medical Ethics in a Time of De-CommunizationRobert Baker (bio)Ethics is often treated as a matter of ethereal principles abstracted from the particulars of time and place. A natural correlate of this approach is the attempt to measure actual codes of ethics in terms of basic principles. Such an exercise can be illuminating, but it can also obscure the circumstances that make a particular codification of morality (...) a meaningful response to specific historic circumstances. This is particularly true of the codes of medical ethics beginning to emerge from the post-Communist societies of Eastern Europe, which are, perhaps, best understood as artifacts of an era, rather than as expressions of abstract principles.The era in question is post-Communist. It is an era informed by a reaction to decades of Communism, which, of course, was more than an economic system or even an ideology; it was a form of life that permeated every aspect of civil society—advertising, art, literature, music. Medicine was not exempt. I recall entering an oncology ward in East Berlin and finding the patients seated around a large table making posters. Wondering whether this was a form of art therapy, I asked the head nurse what the patients were doing. She replied: it is "Party time—the portion of each week every citizen donates to the people and the Party." I looked again at the posters and saw that they honored Karl Marx on the 100th anniversary of his death: "1883-1983, The Struggle Goes On." The Party, the struggle, the people, were everywhere, and they penetrated and informed daily life even for terminal patients on a cancer ward.The interweaving of Communist practices into the warp and woof of daily life has profound implications for the post-Communist era. It means that East Europeans cannot simply rebuild; they must unweave Communist thought patterns—what might be called the ideostructure of Communism—from the fabric of their lives through a deliberate process of deCommunization. What remains after de-Communization depends upon [End Page 363] the historical relationship each country had with Communism. In Russia, removing Communist ideostructure sets the conceptual calendar back to 1918. For the Czechs, the calendar advances to the 1930s, leaving them with thought patterns that are Western, industrial, and democratic. In the rest of Eastern Europe the conceptual clock also tends to turn back to the 1930s, but at that time the conceptual frameworks were nationalist, anti-Western, and frequently fascist, or even Nazi.In Poland the situation is different. World War II opened with the Nazi invasion of the country—which Hitler (later joined by Stalin) subsequently occupied. After the war, the Soviet army controlled the country, which became a captive player in the Soviet sphere of influence (aptly denominated, "the Warsaw Pact"). Poland's pre-Communist thought patterns are nationalist, West-leaning, accepting of parliamentary structures, but also of authoritarian government. They are also Catholic.Catholicism to Poles is not merely a religion, it is a posture of opposition to their German (Nazi, antichristian) and Russian (Orthodox or atheist) occupiers. I toured Polish hospitals several times during the Communist period —always accompanied by one or more "tour guides." (Westerners were not allowed to roam Communist countries unescorted.) Almost all of my guides wore little pins adorned with the face of Lenin (not the hammer and sickle—a symbol of Soviet occupation). Most doctors and nurses, however, adorned themselves with Catholic icons—typically a crucifix. Their conspicuously displayed crosses symbolized less their embrace of Catholicism than their rejection of Communism. Catholicism, in the Polish context, was thus an affirmation of individual and national independence.De-Communizing Polish Medical Ethics: The Abortion ControversyIn Poland, de-Communization was initiated through a series of negotiations between Lech Walensa's Solidarity and the Communist Government. The Polish Code of Medical Ethics is an indirect consequence of these negotiations, which stipulated the dissolution of Communist medical organizations. They were to be replaced by a Polish Medical Chamber—a type of quasi-governmental body, common in Eastern Europe, which combines the functions of a governmental licensing agency with those of a national medical association. Medical chambers also set standards of professional conduct and (unlike... (shrink)

Since the end of apartheid and the advent of democratic elections, South Africa has made great strides, but we still continue, at times, to be unable to practise sawubona. On one level, this is not surprising given our history of separateness. The article asks whether fresh expressions of church, such as the community supper at St Peters in Mowbray, Cape Town, indeed create a space for genuinely ‘seeing’ each other and practicing being human together. The article also explores some of (...) the problems inherent in ethnographic work amongst the poor and the vulnerable by asking whether some types of ethnographic work actually practice a form of epistemic violence and muses upon the idea of the postcolonial gaze and ‘othering’ in ethnography in contexts of poverty in the global South. Can ethnography, in some cases, be a form of academic pornography? (shrink)

Some modern thinkers have supposed that “cause” is an outworn notion, or at least that it is one of which modern science has no need. This is due mainly to the discovery that, while the scientist can give us general laws as to what in fact happens, he cannot help us to discern the reason for the laws or the inward nature of the forces on which they depend. He can tell us the “that” but not the “why”; he cannot (...) show us in a single case that the effect follows necessarily a priori from the nature of the cause, that any other effect than the one which actually takes place would be logically impossible. He has studied the law of gravitation, but this law does not enable him to see why material bodies should attract each other in this fashion; it is only a generalized statement of the fact that they do. He knows that certain substances, if absorbed by eating, will nourish and others destroy our tissues; but he cannot say why they should do so. He can no doubt analyse them further and discover that, for example, meat is nourishing because it contains a large proportion of nitrogenous matter, but he could not tell a priori whether this nitrogenous matter would be likely to nourish or to poison us. Only where mathematics can be applied do we see necessity in such a way that any alternative becomes inconceivable to us; but mathematics alone can never establish from a quantity present here and now what quantity there will be at a later time or in another part of space. Mathematics can show, e.g. , that, if there is 2 + 2 here and now, there must be 4 here and now, not that, if there is 2 + 2 here and now, there will be 4 in an hour's time or a mile away; and therefore it cannot be made the sole basis of any causal law whatever. (shrink)

Taking a panoramic view on the history of modem philosophy, we can learn that political philosophy, a new arena for modem philosophy, has become an important field in philosophical studies since the later half of the 20th century. As far as the problem domain of political philosophy is concerned, political philosophy is only a special form of philosophy. The revival of political philosophy, however, indicates that philosophical inspection of political matters has regained legitimacy, and also means the restaging of philosophy (...) as a knowledge type at modern times. In one sense, we can view the newly-revived political philosophy as typical modemrn philosophy, because its problem domain, its unique angle of looking into the life world and its ideal concern about the actual world make it one of the best ways in which we can reflect the existence of mankind in modern times. (shrink)

To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Harvard University professors Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry, seeks to "rediscover" Martin Luther King, Jr. This is an important and appropriate task for a figure who has achieved mythic status in American political culture, whose words have at times become aphorized in morally bankrupt speeches and corporate campaigns and whose subtly argued theoretical positions have often been diminished in order to "amplify an idea (...) or advance a cause that King actually opposed". King's work and activism developed in concert within a groundswell of grassroots political action and contestation (a point put on fine display perhaps... (shrink)

The supervaluationist approach to branching time (‘SBT-theory’) appears to be threatened by the puzzle of retrospective determinacy: if yesterday I uttered the sentence ‘It will be sunny tomorrow’ and only in some worlds overlapping at the context of utterance it is sunny the next day, my utterance is to be assessed as neither true nor false even if today is indeed a sunny day. John MacFarlane (“Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths” 81) has recently criticized a promising solution (...) to this puzzle for falling short of an adequate account of ‘actually’. In this paper, I aim to rebut MacFarlane's criticism. To this effect, I argue that: (i) ‘actually’ can be construed either as an indexical or as a nonindexical operator; (ii) if ‘actually’ is nonindexical, MacFarlane's criticism is invalid; (iii) there appear to be independent reasons for SBT-theorists to claim that ‘actually’ is a nonindexical expression. (shrink)

Recently I asked a well-known ID sympathizer what shape he thought the ID movement was in. I raised the question because, after some initial enthusiasm on his part three years ago, his interest seemed to have flagged. Here is what he wrote: An enormous amount of energy has been expended on "proving" that ID is bogus, "stealth creationism," "not science," and so on. Much of this, ironically, violates the spirit of science. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. (...) But on the other side, too much stuff from the ID camp is repetitive, imprecise and immodest in its claims, and otherwise very unsatisfactory. The "debate" is mostly going around in circles. The real work needs to go forward. There is a tremendous ferment right now in the "evo/devo" field, for instance. Some bright postdocs sympathetic to ID (and yes, I know how hard a time they would have institutionally at many places) should plunge right into the thick of that. Maybe they are at this very moment: I hope so! Every now and again we need to take a good, hard look in the mirror. The aim of this talk is to help us do just that. Intelligent design has made tremendous inroads into the culture at large. Front page stories featuring our work have appeared in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and so on. Television, radio, and weeklies like Time Magazine are focusing the spotlight on us as well. This publicity is at once useful and seductive. It useful because it helps get the word out and attract talent to the movement. It is seductive because it can deceive us into thinking that we have accomplished more than we actually have. (shrink)

Feminist researchers have urged more study of how feminist practice is actually accomplished in mixed-gender organizations. Social movement scholars have called for more attention to dynamics of gender and race in social movement organizations, especially to the challenges of maintaining internal solidarity. Based on field observations in a pro-feminist, progressive, mixed-gender, mixed-race social movement organization, this article examines organizational decision-making processes and interpersonal and group dynamics. Gendered and racialized patterns of subordination are both very much in evidence and—at the same (...) time—actively challenged in this organization. The author argues that profeminist and progressive organizational practices and efforts to create solidarity across gender and race can exist through competing and contradictory dynamics and ongoing struggles. Complex and inconsistent dynamics around these social barriers are likely to occur in organizations more generally and need to be a subject for more research. (shrink)

Two treatises on memory which have come down to us from antiquity are Aristotle’s “On memory and recollection” and Plotinus’ “On perception and memory” ; the latter also wrote at length about memory in his “Problems connected with the soul”. In both authors memory is treated as a ‘modest’ faculty: both authors assume the existence of a persistent subject to whom memory belongs; and basic cognitive capacities are assumed on which memory depends. In particular, both theories use phantasia to explain (...) memory. Aristotle takes representations to be changes in concrete living things which arise from actual perception. To be connected to the original perception the representation has to be taken as a copy of the original experience ‑ this is the way Aristotle defines memory at the end of his investigation. Plotinus does not define memory: he is concerned with the question of what remembers. This is of course the soul, which goes through different stages of incarnation and disincarnation. Since the disembodied soul can remember, so he does not have Aristotle’s resources for explaining the continued presence of representations as changes in the concrete thing. Instead, he thinks that when acquiring a memory we acquire a capacity in respect of the object of the memory, namely to make it present at a later time. (shrink)

At Pliny, Ep. 5. 18 we read that Macer, the recipient of that letter, has a villa which Pliny says must be lovely, because in qua [sc. villa] se composuerat homo felicior, antequam felicissimus fieret. The identity of this homo felicior is undoubtedly of some interest, but the latest commentary on Pliny's Letters has nothing to say on the matter. However, B. Radice in her two translations of the Letters says that the person in question is Nerva, but adds as (...) a second possibility ‘the dictator Sulla’. In this ambivalence she is at one with many of the older commentators on the Letters. Alone among the commentators examined by us, M. Gesner elects to give preference to Sulla over Nerva. We believe Sulla is certainly the owner in question, but since the ambiguity persists in the scholarly tradition, a fresh look should be taken at the problem and the case against Nerva and for Sulla be put more fully than hitherto. In using the phrase homo felicior, antequam felicissimus fieret without actually naming the person, it is clear that Pliny takes it for granted that the individual in question will be immediately recognizable to Macer, the recipient of the letter, by this description. It follows, therefore, that the phrase had become well established as a commonplace, inevitably and unambiguously linked to one person only. All of our evidence suggests that it cannot be applied to Nerva. First of all it is likely that such a phrase would need time to become accepted into the tradition so as to become readily identifiable, whereas Pliny was writing only a relatively short time after Nerva's reign. (shrink)

The connection of Hermann Сohen’s “The Logic of Pure Knowledge” with the revolutionary transformations in physics and mathematics at the end of the 19th century is shown. Сohen criticised Kant’s answer to the question “How is mathematics possible”? If Kant refers to a priori forms of pure intuition, Сohen sees in it a restriction of freedom of mathematical thinking by limits of intuition. It has been shown that Cohen's position is in accordance with the main development of mathematics in the (...) last decades of the 19th century, in particular, with K. Weierstrass’ striving to get rid of geometrical or mechanical images and intuitions in the mathematical analysis. Cohen was also well informed about the latest ideas in physics of his time. They are also discussed in “The Logic of Pure Knowledge.” The revolutionary spirit of physics and mathematics was appealing to Cohen, and he felt a corresponding enthusiasm for it. The ongoing scientific revolution is consonant with Cohen’s assertion that the foundations of science are hypotheses. The purity of pure thinking does not guarantee the correctness of any of its constructions. Each step in the development of science requires a critique of existing notions. The development of knowledge from the naive to the critical one shows a movement from a picture of the world as a set of stable things to a picture of continuous movement and change, where change is more important than what changes. Cohen sees such a development in an evolution of the concept of substance in modern physics and he welcomes the replacement of material substance by energy, seeing this movement as a confirmation of critical idealism. Finally, it is discussed whether we can speak of the actuality of Cohen’s logic of pure knowledge. (shrink)

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

Volume 23 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis _departs from its predecessors in offering three lengthy studies of unususal interest. Fred Levin's three-part examination of psychoanalysis and knowledge is a simulating, timely effort to relate "a psychoanalyst's thinking about knowledge" to both the clinical situation and what is now known about learning, memory, and knowledge formation in the neurosciences. The late Roy R. Grinker, Sr.'s history of analysis in Chicago was solicited by _The Annual_ in 1975 but declined for publication at (...) the time as too abrasive in tone and too critical in content. It is published here in unexpurgated form, and emerges as both a provocative historical document and a valuable commentary on the state of psychoanalytic education 20 years ago. Finally, in a fascinating contribution to applied analysis, Carol M. Ravenal reexamines Matisse's artwork in the context of the painter's arrested development and subsequent adult conflicts in "Henri Matisse: Love as Art - A Psychobiographical Study." These major contributions are supplemented by clinical and theoretical papers of characteristic excellence. John Gedo's probing evaluation of the "pragmatics of empathy" highlights how empathic responsiveness obliges analysts "to tailor our manner of discourse to the specific requirements of the analysand's current state." Michael Hoit argues that the hermeneutic point of view is an important addition to clinical theory, allowing analysts to understand phenomena outside the boundaries of specific schools and theories. Otto Kernberg examines the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of eating-disorder patients with borderline personality organization. Alice Rosen Soref proffers a revised understanding of the etiology and treatment of narcissistic pathology on the basis of three decades of infant research. And Samuel Weiss discusses the resistance to child analysis of parents who know their children need help but balk at the actual recommendation for treatment. In all, Volume 23 is a worthy response to the ferment of the present time. Encompassing a key period in psychoanalytic history, a scholarly investigation in applied analysis, and a thoughtful assessment of psychoanalysis and brain research, it offers a fine overview of the major tributaries of contemporary analytic scholarship. Supplement these monographic efforts with a careful selection of clinical and theoretical studies and you have an exemplary contribution to the literature. (shrink)

Master corporate valuation: the financial art and science of accurately valuing any business. George Chacko's Applied Corporate Finance: Valuation is the first valuation book to combine true academic rigor with the practical skills you need to successfully value companies in the real world. Renowned financial instructor and investment manager George Chacko focuses on concepts, techniques, tools, and methodologies that lead directly to accurate valuations, and explains each key concept with up-to-date examples. One step at a time, Chacko develops a (...) practical, rigorous approach to conducting valuation, addressing the projection of financial statements, calculation of free cash flows, risk-adjusted cost of capital, and leading methodologies including WACC, flow-to-equity, and Adjusted Present Value (APV). By avoiding elementary content that financial managers, analysts, and MBA-level finance students already know, this book can focus more tightly on the realistic techniques and advanced issues practitioners are actually concerned with. Coverage includes: market value and accounting balance sheets, cash cycles, the DuPont formula, financial distress, and capital as a risk buffer; constructing pro-formas, projecting and bridging financing shortfalls, and planning sustainable growth; sources/uses of cash, cash income statements, pro-forma balance sheet changes, working capital, depreciation, and capital expenditures; risk-free cost, investment risks, and diversifiable vs. idiosyncratic risks; NPV, APV, Optimal Debt Ratios, Capital Structure Dynamics, Terminal Value Calculations, and more. For all finance professionals, analysts, and MBA students who need to sharpen their skills in valuation and related areas of corporate finance, accounting, or strategic planning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SPACE-TIME AND THE COMMUNITY OF BEINGS: SOME COSMOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS INTRODUCTION XERT EINSTEIN, in his essay "Relativity and the Problem of Space," makes several interesting comments on the implications of relativity theory for the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time. Among these are the following: Since the special theory of relativity revealed the physical equivalence of all inertial systems, it proved the untenability of the hypothesis of (...) an aether at rest. It was therefore necessary to renounce the idea that the electromagnetic field is to be regarded as a state of a material carrier. The field then becomes an irreducible element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of matter in the theory of Newton.1 On the basis of the general theory of relativity..., space, as opposed to" what fills space," which is dependent on the coorrdinates, has no separate existence.2 There is no such thing as empty space, i.e., a space without field. Space-time does not claim existence on its own but only as a structural quality of the field. Thus Descartes was not so far from the truth when he believed he must exclude the existence of an empty space. The notion indeed appears absurd, as long as physical reality is seen exclusively in ponderable bodies. It requires the idea of the field as the representative of reality, in combination with the general principle of relativity, to show the true kernel of Descartes' idea; there exists no space " empty of field." 3 1 Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (New York, 1961), pp. 149-150. 2 Ibid., p. 155. s Ibid., pp. 155-156. 480 SPACE-TIME AND THE COMMUNITY OF BEING 481 Space-time is not necessarily something to which one can ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actual objects of physical reality. Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way, the concept "empty space " loses its meaning.4 These statements raise some interesting questions for the philosopher working within the Judaeo-Christian metaphysical and cosmological tradition. Einstein's concept of the spacetime continuum constituted by the field (or by the plurality of fields seen as interrelated) amounts in effect to a reduction of space-time to relation, to that which is constituted by a universal relational network. One may ask whether this concept is, as many seem to believe, a demolition of the classical and Christian view of the world, or whether, on the contrary, it amounts to a rediscovery of that view from the perspective of the vocabulary of contemporary physics. To ask the question in a slightly different way: Does relativity have anything to do with relativism and hence with the anti-ontological thrust of the latter? This question inevitably involves us in the more general question how the physical structure of the cosmos does or does not reflect the ontological structure of being-i.e., how is the cosmos as known by physics related to the world-order as the intelligible object of a philosophical cosmology? How are the various levels of cosmic order, from inorganic matter to the human level, related to one another? It will be the contention of the present essay that the relativistic concept of the cosmos not only is not destructive of the classical and Christian one, but converges with it, because the latter is grounded in the concept of being as being, and being in turn must be understood as the universal concept and reality which has reality by virtue of the community of beings, i.e., by virtue of relation. These concepts will be further clarified in the course of the discussion. Let it be clearly understood, however, that what follows does not pretend to constitute a rigorous logical derivation of a cosmological system but is 4 Ibid.," Note to the Fifteenth Edition," p. vi. 482 GEORGE A. KENDALL rather a series of speculations, of brief glimpses of areas of convergence which have drawn attention to themselves in the course of the struggle for ontological and cosmological truth. As such, they are presented as a step along the way in the search for understanding, not as... (shrink)

American and Chinese interests seem to be at one time in agreement and at another at loggerheads over issues that involve armed services, diplomacy, economics, human rights, intelligence, trade and culture. Part of what may appear to be a growing déracinement, or mutual disenchantment, arising from diverse viewpoints over infrastructure development globally but especially in sensitive developing areas such as the stand-off in the South China Sea and elsewhere along the Pacific coastline of Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific (...) Rim. China seems to be reconstructing its ancient feudal empire, actual or imaginary, in the territory to its South, the ASEAN bloc. This article will address some issues of compatibility and conflict that unite China but that sometimes divide it from the United States and the West, then assesses what alternative strategies should be adopted or abandoned in the interests of global and regional harmony coupled with security. It urges greater cooperation and collaboration, a development of a code of conduct for state behavior in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, together with a concerted East–West effort to maintain a stable economy for China and a sustainable trade relationship between China, Europe, and North America. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was ‘‘synechism’’ because the principle of continuity was its central thesis. He considered time to be the paradigmatic example and often wrote about its various aspects while discussing other topics. This essay draws from many of those widely scattered texts to formulate a distinctively Peircean philosophy of time, incorporating extensive quotations into a comprehensive and coherent (...) synthesis. Time is not an existential subject with past, present, and future as its incompatible predicates, but rather a real law enabling things to possess contrary qualities at its different determinations, and Peirce identifies four classes of such states based on when and how they are realized. Because time is continuous, it is not composed of instants, and even the present is an indefinite lapse during which we are directly aware of constant change. The accomplished past is perpetually growing as the possibilities and conditional necessities of the future are actualized at the present, and the entire universe evolves from being utterly indeterminate toward being absolutely determinate. Nevertheless, time must return into itself even if events are limited to only a portion of it, a paradox that is resolved with the aid of projective geometry. Temporal synechism thus touches on a broad spectrum of philosophical issues including mathematics, phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics. (shrink)

At a time of acute danger, people commonly petition God for help for themselves or their loved ones; such as praying that an avalanche heading in one's direction be diverted, or that an organ donor be found for one's dying child. Such prayer seems natural and, indeed, for believers, reasonable and acceptable. It seems perverse to condemn such typical prayer, as wrong. But once we closely examine what is actually happening in such situations, we shall see that frequently prayer (...) of this sort is morally problematic. I argue that such prayer ought to be seen as a form of action (rather than, say, mere hope), thereby needing to meet the higher moral standards that apply to actions; and that the assumption of the benevolence of the deity does not suffice to make such prayer legitimate. (shrink)

I personally ascribe tremendous importance to the problem of socialization and education: I know of no more important problem. The training of personnel equipped with a high level of specialized qualifications, a scientific worldview, and firm Communist convictions is one of the most important questions of our development. No amount of time is too much to give to its discussion, solution, and philosophical analysis. The convening of this kind of round table, at which representatives of various spheres of scholarship (...) and practice have assembled and at which it is possible to compare and harmonize the most diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary problem, is a very good undertaking. It would seem that this is the essential point of departure for discussing unsolved questions of education and socialization. But it is necessary to look ahead. One would wish to have something like a permanent conference of this kind, regularly functioning and planning its work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Humanism, Female Education, and Myth:Erasmus, Vives, and More's To CandidusA. D. CousinsWhen considering pleasure and chance as aspects of human experience, Thomas More sometimes gendered them female; that is to say, at times he represented them by drawing from the mythographies of Venus and of Fortune. But what did he suggest that actual women, as distinct from goddesses, were or should be or might become: what were his (...) notions of being a woman, of femaleness? Further, what did he suggest that women might contribute to the common weal? A useful way to start answering that question is to look at what More seems to have thought about educating women: in particular, women who were entering adult life—entering into what was agreed to be the major female role—by marrying for the first time and therefore newly taking upon themselves the management of a household. In one of his most ambitious Latin poems, as nowhere else, More wrote elaborately, concisely and problematically on the education of women who were in just those circumstances. My discussion attempts a repositioning of that poem, To Candidus: How to Choose A Wife A Poem in Iambic Dimeter Brachycatalectic (Versvs Iambici Dimetri Brachycatalectici ad Candidvm, Qvalis Vxor Deligenda). To make the attempt involves examining More's other Latin poems on women, as would be anticipated; however, I am mainly concerned here with affinities between To Candidus—then, to a lesser extent, some of More's associated Latin poems—and notions about female education that were or were to become part of the already long, and mostly male, debate about the nature of femaleness.1 To be [End Page 213] specific, I am chiefly concerned with affinities between More's poem and writings by Erasmus and by Vives on the education of prospective or of recent brides.Because the primary concern in my discussion is to clarify the relations between More's To Candidus and humanist notions on female education, especially notions put forward by two of More's humanist friends about young brides, I want initially to revisit the early modern debate on educating women, of course an important element of the wider debate about femaleness itself. One medieval and thence early modern idea on female education was that, in addition to what their mothers taught them, most women needed merely to receive religious and ethical instruction from their husbands, who would likewise instruct them in how to govern a household.2 After all, it was often pointed out, the household was women's natural domain: since, therefore, they would not normally engage with the world at large as would men—since, for example, they would not normally be educators, or writers, or politicians—women did not usually need the broad education appropriate to men.3 Assertion to the contrary was variously argued—and differences between or among those contrary assertions did not always depend on whether an author was male or female. In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a response to Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris and, perhaps unknowingly, also to Plutarch's The Virtues of Women, Christine de Pizan attempted to construct at once a refuge and a resource for [End Page 214] women, whom she recognized as having been misrepresented to themselves no less than to men throughout generations of misogynistic male fictions, ranging from satire to epic, from fable to history.4 Her City, in so far as it is a revisionist history of women, forms a textual space which does indeed offer a refuge as well as a resource, for Christine advocates that women, fulfilling their capabilities as women, aim at "cultivat[ing] virtue" and thereby gaining inclusion in the true, illustrious record of female achievement: membership of a textual community within which they will see themselves reflected and which is at one with the City of God.5 Inseparable from their seeking to do so, she emphasizes, will be their receiving education.6 Despite that emphasis—and despite her emphasizing that women are men's intellectual equals or, not infrequently, superiors—Christine nevertheless defends the concept that the domestic sphere and not the public is in general that "appropriate" to women.7... (shrink)

The influence of East on West - of Eastern ideas on Western thought - has become an increasingly vexed issue in recent times. Opinion is divided between two main schools: those who believe that Oriental ideas have exercised a considerable influence on Western thought, and those who, for a variety of reasons, believe that such influence has remained negligible.In this Reader A. L. Macfie suggests that the reality lies somewhere between these two extremes, and that the interest taken by Western (...) thinkers in Eastern thought in the modern period has moved from one of passing interest, through serious attention, to some level of assimilation and acceptance.Eastern Influences on Western Philosophy explores the extent of Oriental influence on European thought, primarily in the period of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century period of doubt and scepticism that followed it. As such it is the first Reader to bring together in one place a series of specific historical and textual studies of Oriental influence upon European thinkers. Starting with Malebranche and ending with Heidegger, other Western thinkers considered include Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Jung and Buber.To accompany the readings the editor's introduction explores the idea of influence in the context of the chosen readings, and at the same time raises the question of how far Edwards Said's thesis regarding Orientalism actually applies to Western thought.Key Features:* Reflects increasing interest in relationship between Eastern and Western Philosophy* Covers major European figures from the 18th and 19th centuries and the way Eastern thought influenced them* Substantial editorial introduction places readings in context and explores the influence of the East on the West* Previous work by editor praised for its accessibility. (shrink)

Some recent discussions of A. N. Whitehead's treatment of the problem of value have stressed the point that his work in this field is open to serious objection. For example, Professor John Goheen claims that Whitehead's attempt to indicate distinguishing characteristics of experience of “the Good”, is too general to be adequate. He also suggests that this generality of approach makes it impossible for Whitehead to differentiate between different species of value. Further, according to Goheen, Whitehead involves himself in confusion (...) when he claims that satisfaction is achieved when experience is characterized by order ; and yet he also suggests that in some cases, the presence of disorder makes possible a higher type of satisfaction. Professor P. A. Schilpp agrees with Goheen in feeling that Whitehead's explanation of the good life in terms of “pattern” is too vague. In Schilpp's opinion, Whitehead does not answer the basic question: “What kind of pattern?” There is a further objection to Whitehead's “theory of the close connection between morality and beauty,” because at times it looks like an actual identification. Schilpp also objects to what appears to be Whitehead's identification of “good” with “interest”. Finally, it is claimed by Schilpp that Whitehead subordinates goodness to beauty. This interpretation is apparently supported by Prof. George Morgan who states: “Truth and moral values are instrumental except in so far as they enhance beauty.” Professor B. Morris objects to Whitehead's attempt to apply the mathematical method to aesthetic experience. He suggests that the method of symbolic logic is too abstract to deal adequately with concrete aesthetic data. Professor J. W. Blyth, as the result of his examination of Whitehead's theory of truth, reaches the conclusion that “the various elements involved in Whitehead's theory of truth cannot be brought together in one coherent and consistent system. (shrink)

Emotionality is a basic feature of behavior. The argument over whether the expression of emotions is based primarily on culture (constructivism, nurture) or biology (natural forms, nature) will never be resolved because both alternatives are untenable. The evidence is overwhelming that at all ages and all levels of organization, the development of emotionality is epigenetic: The organism is an active participant in its own development. To ascribe these effects to “experience” was the best that could be done for many years. (...) With the rapid acceleration of information on how changes in organization are actually brought about, it is a good time to review, update, and revitalize our views of experience in relation to the concept of basic emotion. (shrink)

Many times in mathematics there is a natural dichotomy betweendescribing some object from the inside and from the outside. Imaginealgebraic varieties for instance; they can be described from theoutside as solution sets of polynomial equations, but one can also tryto understand how it is for actual points to move around inside them,perhaps to parameterize them in some way. The concept of formalproofs has the interesting feature that it provides opportunities forboth perspectives. The inner perspective has been largely overlooked,but in (...) fact lengths of proofs lead to new ways to measure informationcontent of mathematical objects. The disparity between minimallengths of proofs with and without ``lemmas'' provides an indicationof internal symmetry of mathematical objects and their descriptions.A principal observation of this paper is that mathematicalstructures can be embedded into spaces of logical formulae and inheritadditional structure from proofs. We shall look at finitely-generatedgroups, rational numbers and SL(2,Z), and examples fromtopology and analysis. (shrink)

The author analyses the problem of the communication from the epistemological point of view, noting that the interest to the theme is obviously determined by the enormous ambiguity and by the disciplinary vagueness of the communication's notion itself. It is argued that it is the philosophical conceptualization of the communication that allows in a certain sense to «save» philosophy itself. The author notes that the philosophical studies of communication as if return the relevance to the classical philosophical problems: to the (...) (communicative) sphere, (communicative) time, (social) causality, (collective) subject and object, filling them with the meaningful characteristics and testing their concepts by the experience of the functioning of real society and communication. He concludes that the epistemological content of the concept of communication is comes together with several aspects of human cognition. The first aspect has to do with the dimensions for defining the adequacy for determination of the statement made by the Other (i.e. the other participant), given that the content of the Other's consciousness is unavailable. The second aspect is related to the principle of a double purpose of any communication: on the one hand, integration and mutual understanding and, on the other, informational description of the subject of the message. The third aspect is that communication is based on the most important epistemological distinction between knowledge and ignorance, i.e. on the predominance of any information to one participant of the communication and of its uncertainty to the other participant, and that such a situation actually conditions the formation of communication systems, as well as of a wide variety of forms of sociality. The author also addresses the problem of whether contemporary media make communication at all possible since they decrease the impact that the secrecy of the Other's consciousness has on communication by triggering a communicative act. (shrink)

At a time of acute danger, people commonly petition God for help for themselves or their loved ones. Such prayer seems natural and, indeed, for believers, reasonable and acceptable. But once we closely examine what is actually happening in such situations, we see that frequently such prayer is not morally innocuous. I present a number of examples which illustrate the difficulty, and argue that even assuming the benevolence of the deity does not suffice to make such prayer legitimate.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 12–Minute JourneyHeather A. CarlsonI met Jack for the first time when he was in the intensive care unit as he was just waking up from his emergent tracheostomy surgery. As I walked into his room he opened his eyes in panic and he struggled to take in a deep breath, fighting the ventilator that was trying to deliver slow steady breaths for him. His face was flooded (...) with fear and the ventilator alarms were blaring. He was surrounded by nurses and respiratory technicians all trying to calm him down, while adjusting the settings on the machine. “Just try and breathe slowly,” they instructed him, though this seemed to be impossible for him as he continued to try and suck in as much air as possible through the new hole in his throat. As his arm flailed out I grabbed his hand and while holding it in mine I just tried to emulate tranquility for him. I thought to myself this is exactly how I would react if I woke up in this condition and could imagine the fear that he was now feeling. While nurses rushed around with suction equipment and the respiratory technicians made adjustments and monitored the results I stood there holding his hand silently praying that he become calm. With all of our support he did eventually relax and find the ability to sync his breathing with the ventilator settings.I am a palliative care nurse practitioner and had been asked to see Jack to help with symptom management and establishing his goals of care as he had recently been diagnosed with head and neck cancer. He had presented to the hospital with complaints of difficulty breathing and it didn’t take long for the emergency room physician to determine that his airway was almost completely occluded by tumor. Jack had actually been diagnosed with this cancer the month before, and had met with a radiation oncologist who planned to start radiation as soon as possible to avoid tumor growth that could impair his breathing. Unfortunately Jack was so anxious and scared about this treatment plan that he never went back to the cancer center. Instead, he stayed in his room in the boarding house that he lived in, smoking cigarettes to calm his nerves. Jack was a recovering alcoholic who had previously been homeless and out on the streets for many years before becoming sober and finding shelter at the boarding house where he now lived. He was a heavy smoker and found that it was one thing that helped to ease his anxiety. The thought of being strapped down to a table with a tight mask over his head while radiation zapped the cancer in his neck had terrified him. His anxiety and claustrophobia had prevented him from following through with his cancer treatment.My initial visits with Jack were spent trying to treat his anxiety as well as the pain he experienced in his neck and head.Because he had undergone a tracheostomy and was now on a ventilator he was unable to speak. To communicate he pointed to a picture board that had common sayings on it, like “I have pain” and “I have to go to the bathroom”. He also used a clipboard with paper and pen and could write what he wanted to say, but this was a time consuming endeavor. Despite this, he was a very animated gentleman who had a lot to say and he wasn’t going to let the loss of his voice impair him. I found myself enjoying my visits with him each day, as he would tell me more about himself. I quickly discovered that he was a very spiritual man and his faith was his inspiration. He wrote on his clipboard “this cancer is actually a gift” and went on to explain that he had been on a fast track toward self destruction, but now feels as though he has been given another chance at life. He spent his time in the hospital reflecting on his life’s journey and how he would be able to help others in similar circumstances. He wrote on his [End Page 192] clipboard multiple... (shrink)

Helen Fielding, in examining Yael Bartana’s video art works, in particular, Wild Seeds (2005), argues that politics seem to privilege the temporal, and video art thus lends itself to this enactment. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, she concludes that the in-between, while a space and not a territory, is more a spacing, a taking place between people “no matter where they happen to be” than a place as such. In Bartana’s works, the temporal aspect of video allows her to open up (...) a time-space, or rather a spacing as a relation rather than a place. It is a spacing that takes place only when the art work sets to work in its engagement with viewers, that is, when the video is playing in a public space. Moreover, Bartana generally takes up temporally circumscribed events that are deeply embedded in the past, yet show up either disjuncture or parallels between national identity and individual embodied narratives. While national identity might rely upon fusion, Bartana’s videos upset that identity by opening up a spacing where identity can be questioned. Filming events such as a demonstration, an initiation into military weapons training, as well as play, her videos draw upon ritualized events that, in their repetition, are often meant to work performatively at a corporeal level to create a national and cultural unity. Her videos affectively and phenomenally draw the viewer into the corporeal experience of these rituals in order to show up the ruptures; indeed, they seem to suggest that it is at the level of the corporeal that this cohesion can both be effected and also undone. In other words, rather than focusing on national identity which is exclusive and hence spatial, corporeal being-with is temporal—the polis is figured as embodied intermittent relations or spacings rather than as an actual territory or space. -/- . (shrink)

I identify and characterize the kind of personal-level control-structure that is most relevant for skilled action control, namely, what I call, “practical intention”. I differentiate between practical intentions and general intentions not in terms of their function or timing but in terms of their content. I also highlight a distinction between practical intentions and other control mechanisms that are required to explain skilled action. I’ll maintain that all intentions, general and practical, have the function specifying, sustaining, and structuring action but (...) that several functions that have been attributed to proximal intentions are actually implemented by other control mechanisms that are not themselves best identified as intentions. Specifically, I will claim that practical intentions do not initiate, monitor, specify or guide the fine-grained, online, kinematic aspects of action. Finally, I suggest that the way in which practical and general intentions should be differentiated is in terms of their content, where general intentions specify the overall goal, outcome, or end of an action as it is conceived of by the agent at a time, and practical intentions determine the means to that end. I conclude by providing empirical evidence to support this way of characterizing the intentions that “interface” with the mechanisms of motor control. Though this discussion has repercussions for action in general, I will limit my discussion to cases of skill. (shrink)

In recent times, daily, ordinary medical practices have incontrovertibly been developing under the condition of complexity. Complexity jeopardizes the moral core of practicing medicine: helping people, with their illnesses and suffering, in a medically competent way. Practical wisdom has been proposed as part of the solution to navigate complexity, aiming at the provision of morally good care. Practical wisdom should help practitioners to maneuver in complexity, where the presupposed linear ways of operating prove to be insufficient. However, this solution is (...) unsatisfactory, because the proposed versions of practical wisdom are too individualistic of nature, while physicians are continuously operating in varying teams, and dealing with complicated technologies and pressing structures. A second point of critique is, that these versions are theory based, and thus insufficiently attuned to the actual context of everyday medical practices. Now, our proposal is to use an approach of practical wisdom that enables medical practices to counter the complexity issue and to re-invent the moral core of medical practicing as well. This implies a practice oriented approach, as thematized by practice theory, qualitative empirical research from the inside, and abduction from actual performed practical wisdom towards an apt understanding of phronèsis. (shrink)

In what may be the most radical business book ever published, philosopher Jay Ogilvy shows that living without a goal is the only way to accomplish anything. In the 1980s we ran our lives with all the direction and confidence filofaxes and to-do lists could provide. Always knowing exactly where we were headed, we climbed toward the goals corporate America held out in front of us like so many carrots: higher salaries, better titles, more impressive offices. But after a decade (...) of climbing, the air is getting thin. We crave the chance to create, to express ourselves, and to make a difference, not just a living. It is time, says businessman/philosopher James Ogilvy, to tear up the to-do lists and grant ourselves the freedom to enjoy what E. M. Forster calls "the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation." Ogilvy shows that richness and color and flavor flood back into our lives once we set aside the goals that hold us captive. He explores how philosophers (from Plato to Nietzsche), lovers, ideologues, and executives have at one time or another lived without goals. What emerges from his argument is a new look at how to achieve personal creativity and freedom by fashioning one's day to-day life, not as a larger goal-producing machine, but as a personal work of art. (shrink)

The problem of the subject area of ethics is, so to speak, one with a "double bottom," for beneath the discussion of its subject matter in the narrow sense is actually concealed a diversity of positions and notions on the part of the participants regarding various prospects for the development of that discipline, the relationship among its various aspects, ways of perfecting its methodology, and so forth. This is a response to the new demands made by practical life in socialist (...) society today. It is also a result of the internal logic of the development of ethical thought and, in a certain sense, of the forecasting of science. It is precisely in this framework that V. T. Efimov's article should mainly be considered. It attracts attention, at the right time and in a polemically acute fashion, to the most urgent "growth points" of ethical knowledge, those urgently requiring joint discussion and decision. Also well chosen, in its way, is the term morality studies, even in the capacity of a preliminary denotation of the entire basic sphere of practical, concrete "validation" of ethics as a philosophical discipline. This term reflects, in our opinion, important trends in the development over the past decade of those aspects of ethics and its methodology that were previously described either as "descriptive ethics," "the sociology of morals," or "the sociology of socialization," or as "ethology," "ethnology," and so forth. As we know, all those terms suffered from imprecision or ambiguity of meaning and did not take root in Soviet philosophical literature. (shrink)

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense and meaning out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and see Nothing? This book redefines Nothing as a historical object and reorients historical consciousness in terms of an awareness of what has and has not been considered worth remembering. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is (...) supposedly uninteresting, not happening, all that we have skipped over or is just not there. It will take some (possibly considerable) mental adjustment before we can see Nothing in the way this author has come to think of it, with a capital N. But if we are to transform Nothing into a legitimate historical object, something that exists in the present and has existed in the past, we must see it that way. For Nothing has actually been there all along, in plain sight. When nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when nothing happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being disappointed when nothing happens-for instance, when a forecast end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup and recalibrate their predictions. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Visually driven, this book explores the ways that modern photographers, artists and writers have depicted ruins, emptiness, and a lack of action. It shows us how the perception that "nothing is the way it was" has produced images and art about memories. The book also analyzes such phenomena as fake historical markers that joke about how "On This Site Nothing Happened" to reflect on our everyday awareness that important events and places from the past be remembered. Most of all, it uncovers the mistake of taking Nothing for granted--because Nothing is happening all the time. (shrink)

Muḥkam and mutashābih have developed as two topics that are related to every field of religious studies throughout the historical process. The fact that this has been a topic of controversy in every field of religious studies is due to the fact that verses of the Qur’an were classified as muḥkam and mutashābih by the verses of the Qur’an. Discussions and suggestions regarding muḥkam and mutashābih generally tended to be limited to the studies about the semantic definitions of the terms (...) or were shaped around the narratives about the circumstances of the revelation and thus digression from the actual context was inevitable. In addition, acknowledging muḥkam and mutashābih as semantic qualities of the Qur’an raised doubts over the Qur’an's status as an understandable text. As mutashābih verses were considered by some as ambiguous, this enabled each school of thought to base their opinions on the verses of the Qur'an. The fact that current interpretations of the verses of the Qur’an are not made free from the historical points of view is due to the strength of the historical knowledge. Qur’an demands faith in the previous canons as well as demanding faith in the previous messengers. In this context, muḥkam are the genuine commandments of the Qur’an which did not exist in the previous canons whereas mutashābih are the commandments that resemble the ones in the previous canons. This research employs analysis, comparison and criticism methods for examining its subject matter. Meanings of the verses of the Qur’an are analyzed linguistically and the relations between the terms in this context are attempted to be shown. In interpreting the verses about the topic, arguments of different schools of thought are included. Criticism of the previous interpretations is carried out considering the contextual and semantic integrity of the Qur'an. It is also stated that while forming its muḥkam verses, the Qur’an employed the methods of abrogation, adjournment and conversion. Abrogation is not an annulation of the own verses of the Qur’an but an annulation of a commandment in a previous canon. Adjournment means not to abrogate a commandment of a previous canon but their inclusion in the new canon. The cases that the Qur’an mentions in which the messenger is accused of fabricating are stated to be due to the conversion of the commandments the interlocutors had already known by genuine verses of the Qur’an. To regard muḥkam and mutashābih as genuine and resembling verses would fortify the judgement that the verses of the Qur’an are comprehensible. This paper concludes that the muḥkam verses provide the fundamentals of the system of law which is the Qur’an, and mutashābih are the verses that are in the Qur’an and show resemblance to previous laws that were already present at the time. In relation to this, that those with crooked hearts tracing after the mutashābih is interpreted to mean that they investigated whether the ayats were included in the previous canons and that Allah knows the gloss of the mutashābih ayats is interpreted to mean that He knows in which canon the ayats were first included and finally the attitude of those with deep wisdom towards the muteshâbih ayats is explained as that with their vast knowledge on revelation, they confess that all the resembling ayats were revealed by Allah. (shrink)

The paper aims to rectify the reception of Heidegger’s so-called “hermeneutic violence,” by addressing the under-investigated issue of its actual target and rationale. Since the publication of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, some of Heidegger’s contemporary readers, such as Cassirer, as well as more recent commentators, accused Heidegger of doing violence to Kant’s and other philosophers’ texts. I show how the rationale of Heidegger’s self-acknowledged violence becomes tenable in light of his personal notes on his Kant book, and (...) of several hermeneutic tenets from Being and Time. The violence at stake turns out to be a genuine method, involving the appropriation (Zueignen) and the elaboration (Ausarbeiten) of an interpreted text. Its target, I argue, is not the text itself, as it was often assumed, but its reception by a community or tradition. Thus, that violence may well instill interpretive conflict, yet its purpose is to salvage a text from a conventional and ossified reception, namely, from what Heidegger regards as the authoritarianism of idle talk (Gerede) in a philosophical milieu. (shrink)

Based on an ad hoc online survey about risk perception and preventive behaviours, we describe three chronological phases related to how people in Germany perceived the Corona pandemic between March 22 and May 10, 2020. In general, participants reported to be less concerned about their own risk than about the risk faced by others. However, a good portion of those who thought that they themselves were low risk actually wrote about their belief that they nevertheless had a responsibility to behave (...) in ways that benefited others, even if it came at a cost to themselves. In loose reference to Immanuel Kant’s notion that humans have a rational duty to act in a socially responsible manner, we interpret people’s comments about other-regarding behaviour as an initiation of a Kantian tendency during the Corona pandemic. Based on these findings, we suggest that policy makers may do better in times of crisis than nudging, incentivizing, or compelling the public by law. They can perhaps accomplish more by nurturing people’s innate sense of the need for socially responsible action to be taken in order to meet the daunting challenges of present and future crises. (shrink)

Schizophrenia involves profound but enigmatic disturbances of affective or emotional life. The affective responses as well as expression of many patients in the schizophrenia spectrum can seem odd, incongruent, inadequate, or otherwise off-the-mark. Such patients are, in fact, often described in rather contradictory terms: as being prone both to exaggerated and to diminished levels of emotional or affective response. According to Ernst Kretschmer, they actually tend to have both kinds of experience at the same time. This paper attempts to (...) explain what might be termed this 'Kretschmerian paradox'. Some relevant concepts and vocabulary for affect and emotion are discussed . The need for a phenomenological approach focusing on subjective experience is suggested. Three modes of abnormal experience in schizophrenia are investigated in light of their implications for affect or emotion: alienation of the lived body ; fragmented perception and loss of affordances ; and preoccupation with a quasi-delusional world created by the self. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Standing at the Intersections: Navigating Life as a Black Intersex ManSean Saifa WallAs I sit down to write this narrative, my mind is reflecting on the past year. This year has seen numerous protests against state–sanctioned violence with the declaration that “Black Lives Matter”. As a Black intersex man, I have witnessed the impact of state–sanctioned violence on my family and my community, both from the police state and (...) medical community. I charge the police state and the medical community with state– sanctioned violence: Each targets non–normative bodies—the former through incarceration and execution, and the latter by means of surgical and hormonal intervention. As a Black intersex man, I stand at the intersection bearing witness to how this violence has incarcerated my friends and loved ones as well as being subjected to medically unnecessary surgical intervention. Although this is where I stand now, both socially and politically, I have not always existed here.I was born in the winter of 1978 at Columbia–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. I was the youngest of five children and one of three children in my family who were born with an intersex trait now known as androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). At the time, AIS was referred to as “testicular [End Page 117] feminization syndrome.” Upon receiving my medical records years later at the age of twenty–five, I noticed scribbling and a barrage of notes indicating the process by which the doctors assigned my gender as female. Although I had ambiguous genitalia, which caused some initial confusion among the doctors, XY chromosomes were not enough for me to be raised as male. My mother was told I would be raised as a girl and, according to the medical records, “function as such.”Unlike my sisters who were also born with AIS, my mom was not swayed by the surgical recommendations doctors made about my body. As a matter of protocol, my sisters’ gonads were removed in infancy, however, my mom made the decision that my testes would remain with me until they had to be removed.Because of intense pain in my groin area, my testicles were removed when I was thirteen years old. The pain that I felt following the surgery was perhaps the worst pain that I have experienced in my entire life. After surgery, my pediatrician prescribed estrogen and Provera as a hormonal replacement regimen. Fatty deposits changed the shape and contours of my face. Once robust and chiseled thighs now harbored cellulite. The beginnings of facial hair and prominent body hair became wispy and nonexistent. What was hard and defined became soft.At no point did anyone ask me what I wanted to do with my body.I actually missed the effects of my natural testosterone such as a deepening voice, increased hair and muscle mass; when I asked if I could take both testosterone and estrogen after surgery, my mother remarked, “You would look too weird.”The hormone therapy was coupled with intense social conditioning. I feel as if the social conditioning for young women raised with AIS is suffocating. When doctors prescribed hormones for me to take, my mother constantly reminded me how “beautiful” the little yellow pills would make me. As a means of reassurance, my pediatrician told my mom that “a lot of fashion models” have AIS and that I would most certainly be beautiful. In our dominant US culture, gender norms can already be oppressive, but for women with AIS, there is the impact of gender norms and the underlying fear that women with AIS are not really women since they have XY chromosomes. I did not succumb to the pressure to be more feminine, but actually gravitated toward masculinity. Before transitioning to live as a man, I considered myself a butch woman. When I came out of the closet at fourteen years old and presented as a masculine young woman, I never felt safe. Because I dated women who were more feminine than I, my relationship with these women seemed threatening to men who repeatedly reminded me through harassment and threats that “I was not a man.” Of course, I wasn’t trying to be a... (shrink)

Death is an invariant of human existence, a kind of its “omega point”. At the same time, the attitude towards it is not a constant, but rather undergoes changes, being incorporated in a wide sociocultural context. The mail goal of the article is an analysis of the nature of these changes at the present stage specifically under the influence of rapid biotechnological progress and dilemmas generated by these changes. Firstly, there is a tendency of increasing optimism: some theorists tend (...) to perceive death not as an inevitable reality, but rather as a problem and a challenge. At the same time a radical direction arises, believing that death can be overcome only through the complete separation of man from its body substrate. The utopian nature of this project forces more moderate theorists to look for indirect way, which consists in a “war” with aging as the main predecessor of death, up to attempts of its complete abolition. Gradually, the formation of scientific immortology as a kind of opposition for thanatology takes place. At the same time, many theorists, and even more ordinary people remain skeptical position about the prospects for victory over death. It can be concluded that biomedical progress actualizes general human intention for self-preservation and death avoidance, but science requires an assessment of not only the objective possibilities for overcoming death but also both ontological and anthropological consequences of it. (shrink)

To investigate the current status of hospital clinical ethics committees (CEC) and how they have evolved in Canada over the past 20 years, this paper presents an overview of the findings from a 2008 survey and compares these findings with two previous Canadian surveys conducted in 1989 and 1984. All Canadian hospitals over 100 beds, of which at least some were acute care, were surveyed to determine the structure of CEC, how they function, the perceived achievements of these committees and (...) opinions about areas with which CEC should be involved. The percentage of hospitals with CEC in our sample was found to be 85% compared with 58% and 18% in 1989 and 1984, respectively. The wide variation in the size of committees and the composition of their membership has continued. Meetings of CEC have become more regularised and formalised over time. CEC continue to be predominately advisory in their nature, and by 2008 there was a shift in the priority of the activities of CEC to meeting ethics education needs and providing counselling and support with less emphasis on advising about policy and procedures. More research is needed on how best to define what the scope of activities of CEC should be in order to meet the needs of hospitals in Canada and elsewhere. More research also is needed on the actual outcomes to patients, families, health professionals and organisations from the work of these committees in order to support the considerable time committee members devote to this endeavour. (shrink)

Although research has demonstrated the benefit of psychological detachment for employee well-being, the explanatory mechanisms related to work behaviors underlying this effect remain underdeveloped. Addressing this research gap, we consider self-discrepant time allocation (preferred–actual allocation) as a mediating mechanism through which psychological detachment affects employee well-being. We hypothesize that psychological detachment is associated with self-discrepant time allocation at work. Specifically, we suggest that employees with low detachment tend to allocate more time than preferred to work activities (...) that demand fewer self-regulatory resources, and allocate less time than preferred to activities demanding greater self-regulatory resources. These self-discrepant time allocations at work are associated with employee well-being. Polynomial regression analysis and response surface methodology were used to test the hypotheses. The results, based on a sample of 390 faculty members from 19 universities, showed that, when psychological detachment during weekends is low and self-regulatory resources are insufficient, employees will allocate less time than preferred to work activities that require more self-regulatory resources (i.e., researching activities) during the subsequent work period. Instead, employees tend to allocate more time to activities that require less resources (i.e., teaching activities). These discrepancies between actual and preferred time allocation at work activities, in turn, negatively affect employee well-being and mediate the relationship between psychological detachment and employee well-being. (shrink)

Comment: This translation contains a correction of an argument in the original English edition, a correction that was subsequently made in the 1999 English Paperback edition, The correction is described below in the final paragraph. Differences in language can seriously restrict one's access to, and knowledge of, the philosophical work that's being done in other countries, and before the publication in 1997 of my book Time, Tense, and Causation, I was not aware of the depth of interest, in Italy, (...) in analytical philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular. Since that time, however, I've had the opportunity of talking to, and corresponding with, Italian philosophers who are currently working very intensely on problems in the philosophy of time. I very much enjoyed those discussions, and so I'm very pleased indeed that my book has now been translated into Italian. -/- The introduction to the book will provide readers with quite a detailed overview of my approach to the philosophy of time, and of the main theses that I am defending. But perhaps it will be helpful here if I try to sketch, very briefly, the big picture. -/- The central issue in the philosophy of time concerns the choice between tensed and tenseless accounts of the nature of time – or, as I prefer to express it, between dynamic and static conceptions of reality. According to tensed (or dynamic) accounts, there are significant ontological differences between the past, the present, and the future – either because the world contains intrinsic tensed properties of passiveness, presentness, and futurity, or else because the past, the present, and the future are not all equally real. In contrast, according to tenseless (or static) views of the nature of time, there are no intrinsic tensed properties, and the past, the present, and the future are all equally real. In this book, I defend a dynamic view of time dash specifically, one according to which, while the past and the present are now real, the future is not. This view has, of course, a very long history, with a version of it having been defended by Aristotle in his famous discussion of the sea battle tomorrow, in which he argued that, although it is now true – indeed necessarily so – that either there will be a sea battle tomorrow or there will not be one, it is not now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and not now true that there will not be one. Only when tomorrow comes will the world contain states of affairs that make one of these propositions true, and the other false. -/- But while this general view of the nature of time has a very long and distinguished history – and also seems, intuitively, quite appealing – it has become clear, especially in this century, that it is exposed to very strong objections – objections moreover, that come not merely from philosophy, but also from contemporary physics, and especially from Einstein's special theory of relativity. One of the main challenges accordingly, for any defense of a tensed or dynamic view of time, is to show that those objections can be answered. -/- In grappling with those objections, however, one thing that emerged very clearly was that some theses that defenders of tensed approaches to time have traditionally viewed as absolutely essential must be abandoned as unsound. The result is that. I was led to a view of the nature of time that is, in many respects, intermediate between tenseless views of time and traditional tensed approaches. In particular, advocates of traditional tensed views almost always maintain that the simplest temporal facts are themselves inherently tensed: they consist of facts such as, for example, that is certain apple is now red. But I maintain that, on the contrary, the simplest temporal facts, rather than being intrinsically tensed, are facts to the effect, for example, that a certain apple is now red at time t. On this fundamental issue, then, I agree with those who accept a tenseless or static view of time, since they too hold that the simplest tensed facts ¬– and indeed all tensed facts – are not tensed facts. How, then, does my approach to the nature time differ from a tenseless or static approach? The answer is that I also maintain that, although basic tensed facts are not inherently tensed, the world is nevertheless a dynamic one, since every present moment is a point at which things come into existence. Events, therefore, are not merely actual or nonactual – as is maintained by advocates of tenseless approaches to time. Rather an event is actual as of some time, and not actual as of other times. One needs, therefore, a temporally indexed notion of actuality, according to which an event is not actual until the time at which it occurs, and given that notion, one can explain, in a straightforward fashion, what it is for events to lie in the past, the present, and the future, and in the way that entails that the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- One task, as I have said, is to show that the many objections that have been advanced against dynamic conceptions of the world dash by philosophers – such as McTaggart, Quine, Smart, Putnam, and Mellor – can be answered. But even if, as I claim, this can be done, one is still left, of course, with the question of what positive reason there is, if any, for accepting a tensed or dynamic view of the world. -/- The argument that I develop in response to this question centers upon the concept of causation, and here I argue, first, that there are decisive objections to reductionist approaches to causation; secondly, that it is possible to set out a very plausible realistic account of the nature of causation; and, thirdly, that the crucial postulates that are involved in that account can only be satisfied in a dynamic world – indeed only in a dynamic world in which the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- This way of defending the view that our world is a dynamic one also has implications for some other issues – in particular, issues connected with the subtle and very difficult metaphysical question of the relation between time and causation. Thus, after setting out the above argument, I attempt to show that if causation can exist only in a dynamic world, then one can both demonstrate that backward causation is logically impossible and defend the view that the direction of time is to be defined in terms of the direction of causation, rather than vice versa. -/- Finally, a comment on the text. It involves one major change from the original English edition – namely in sections 4. 6.2 and 4.7. The change in those sections involves the crucial part in my argument both for the claim that our world is one where the past and present are real, but the future is not, and for the claim that backward causation is logically impossible. It was pointed out to me by Kenji Murota, a graduate student of philosophy at Keio University, that there was a problem in my original formulation of that argument. I'm grateful to him for his incisive criticism, and I'm pleased that I've had the opportunity of correcting that argument in the present edition. (shrink)

Collective intelligence in organizational teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of the quality of the outcomes that the team produces. This manuscript aims to extend the understanding of CI in teams, by disentangling the core of actual collective intelligent team behavior that unfolds over time during a collaboration period. We posit that outcomes do support the presence of CI, but that collective intelligence itself resides in the interaction processes within the team. Teams behave collectively intelligent (...) when the collective behaviors during the collaboration period are in line with the requirements of the tasks the team is assigned to and the environment. This perspective results in a challenging, but promising research agenda armed with new research questions that call for unraveling longitudinal fine-grained interactional processes over time. We conclude with exploring methodological considerations that assist researchers to align concept and methodology. In sum, this manuscript proposes a more direct, thorough, and nuanced understanding of collective intelligence in teams, by disentangling micro-level team behaviors over the course of a collaboration period. With this in mind, the field of CI will get a more fine-grained understanding of what really happens at what point in time: when teams behave more or less intelligently. Additionally, when we understand collectively intelligent processes in teams, we can organize targeted interventions to improve or maintain collective intelligence in teams. (shrink)

In pursuit of my ultimate objective of being in control of my self-deliverance at the time when my physical condition no longer warrants continuance, I have joined the Hemlock Society of Los Angeles. The Society urges its members to explore with their personal physicians this subject well in advance of the actual moment of necessity, and in particular the problem of acquiring a lethal dose of a drug that will provide a release consistent in quality with the degree (...) of peace and serenity sought in life. It is my hope that we can find a process commensurate with your moral and professional concerns which will allow us to collaborate. (shrink)

South Africa in which we are living is characterised by unparalleled social and political change and apparently enormous differences of option. However, there is one aspect of our society that most of us would probably agree about and that is the decline of morality in our cities. Apart from the economic and political crisis, and the erosion of the core competence to actually get things done in the municipalities, South Africa is an ailing society with disturbing pathologies in terms of (...) indiscipline, violence, rape, assault, fraud and a failure to accept personal accountability for the high levels of crime, corruption, xenophobic attacks, gender-based violence and disintegration of families. The main aim of this study is to outline the profile of moral decay in the South African urban community and to define the calling of the Church towards moral regeneration. The conclusion arrived at is that there are definite signs of moral degeneration over a wide sphere of human endeavour in South African urban community, and that the church has a particular role to play as a driving agent for moral renewal.Contribution: Whilst there are many postive things brought by urbanisation in our cities, however, moral decay in our South African cities is one of the biggest threats to South Africa’s hard earned, freedom and democracy and merits closer attention. This study in ethics joins the voices of those people who are propagating moral regeneration in our times. (shrink)

Many different serious challenges like catastrophes, conflicts, wars humanity often has to face make both historical science and philosophy of history (historiosophy) very actual branches of knowledge. It is necessary to take care of their theoretical basis thoroughly. That is why development of human rational approach to historical process must be considered as an important problem of philosophical discourse. The aim of our research is to prove the expediency of moderate rational comprehension of historic process. The research methodology can (...) be explained as critical rationalism in the meaning of tending to use our rational abilities actively. Research results: Having analyzed the theory of cognition by famous Polish thinker and artist Leon Chwistek, the author of the treatise underlines the value of the so-called “strict thinking”. Undoubtedly, the usage of the latter is really able to improve a process of scientific exploration. At the same time, we should to avoid the absolutization of our rational potential: it is obvious enough one just cannot comprehend all the facts connected with the object of our study. Actually, there is plenty of historical facts, and it is impossible to take into consideration all of them with the help of our sensory cognition and to think all of them over as well. Thereby, rationalism as a belief in our intellectual potential must the moderate and even the modest one. Conclusions. The moderate rationalistic position would help scientists to be careful while making their conclusions. Such reasonable approach presents a theoretical instrument of more or less successful and adequate comprehension of history and of its principles – the only possible way of rational studying of historical process. (shrink)

Background:Surveillance technology such as tag and tracking systems and video surveillance could increase the freedom of movement and consequently autonomy of clients in long-term residential care settings, but is also perceived as an intrusion on autonomy including privacy.Objective:To explore how clients in residential care experience surveillance technology in order to assess how surveillance technology might influence autonomy.Setting:Two long-term residential care facilities: a nursing home for people with dementia and a care facility for people with intellectual disabilities.Methods:Ethnographic field study.Ethical considerations:The boards (...) representing clients and relatives/proxies of the clients were informed of the study and gave their written consent. The clients’ assent was sought through a special information leaflet. At any time clients and/or proxy were given the option to withdraw from the study. The research protocol was also reviewed by a medical ethics committee.Findings:Our findings show a pattern of two themes: (1) coping with new spaces which entailed clients: wandering around, getting lost, being triggered, and retreating to new spaces and (2) resisting the surveillance technology measure because clients feel stigmatized, missed the company, and do not like being “watched.”Conclusion:Client experiences of surveillance technology appear to entail a certain ambivalence. This is in part due to the variety in surveillance technology devices, with each device bringing its own connotations and experiences. But it also lies in the devices’ presupposition of an ideal user, which is at odds with the actual user who is inherently vulnerable. Surveillance technology can contribute to the autonomy of clients in long-term care, but only if it is set in a truly person-centered approach. (shrink)