It is commonplace to point out that Alfred Kinsey's taxonomic work on gall wasps provided a methodology for his studies of human sexual behavior. It is equally commonplace to point out that, when researching and presenting his sexual studies, Kinsey's professedly neutral scientific data were constrained by a social agenda. What I have done in this paper is to join these two claims and demonstrate, with particular reference to Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, how (...) his zoology helped guide Kinsey to a naturalistic ethics that, despite contrasts to, shared certain parallel logical failures with the traditional ethics of his critics. (shrink)

The role of Alfred Kinsey, America's most influential sexologist, in the cultural revolution of sex and gender during the past fifty years remains as unquestionable as it has been controversial. This admiring biography argues that Kinsey also qualifies as an authentic great man of science in the tradition of Darwin. Kinsey's expert authority was recently challenged by James Jones, who claimed in his 1997 biography that Kinsey's terrible personal secrets—homosexuality and masochism—plagued his life and ruined (...) his science. Jonathan Gathorne‐Hardy sets out to repair Kinsey's reputation by defending him against this “Kenneth Starr school of biography” . The author seeks to rescue Kinsey's achievement from the stigmatizing charge that it was flawed because it subordinated science to subjectivity.Gathorne‐Hardy emphasizes Kinsey's methodological creativity and his interviewing genius. During his early career, when he worked on gall wasps, Kinsey's science developed as a practice of scrupulous collection, observation, and documentation. Even in graduate school, he was dubbed “get a million Kinsey,” and his belief in sheer quantity—as well as quantification—was just as apparent when he turned his attention to human sexuality. In 1938 Kinsey taught a course on marriage at Indiana University, where he spent his entire working life. Limited to married or engaged students and faculty, the course covered reproductive physiology, contraception, and a host of other sexual topics in explicit detail. Kinsey also used the course to gather data about his students' sex lives. The thousands of sexual histories collected at the Institute for Sex Research in later years—7,985 by Kinsey alone—attest to his scientific commitment to behavior as the only legitimate basis for a science of sex.The behavioral unit of analysis chosen by Kinsey was the orgasm—or “outlet,” as Kinsey called it. Because it was countable, the theory went, it was objective. Kinsey's ethic of measurement resulted in interviews involving at least 350 standard questions, whose answers were recorded in a custom code designed to fit on a single sheet of paper divided into 287 squares. Among the ironies of Kinsey's method was the fact that his sex histories measured linguistic rather than sexual behavior. What Kinsey actually compiled was a huge cache of stories, not direct observations of sexual behavior. Kinsey, who gathered more sexual stories than any other person alive, systematically aimed to eradicate all quirks and complexities in order to produce a statistical portrait of population‐wide behavior. Meanings might be historically important, but numbers, not narratives, would yield truth. The easy use of “human males” and “human females” in the titles of Kinsey's famous reports suggests how universal his scientific claims were—and also how devoid of temporal and cultural particularity.The resulting conception of human sexual nature is probably best represented in Kinsey's six‐point scale, where behavioral possibilities ranged from exclusively homosexual at one pole to exclusively heterosexual at the other. Diversity emerged as the premier fact about sexual behavior. While this placed men and women uncomfortably close to their primate cousins on an evolutionary map, making human sexual exceptionalism objectively unsustainable, it also produced a reformist sensibility that rooted its demand for toleration in the powerful evidence of natural facts. It is difficult to overstate how shocking Kinsey's picture of polymorphous sexuality was in a culture devoted to either/or binaries and prone to harsh judgments about deviation from norms. Kinsey's contribution was to point out the gap between ideology and behavior . That lots of people did lots of things at odds with professed sexual morality was, for some, a welcome relief and call to revolution. For others, it was a reason to hate Kinsey and blame him for changes in the realm of gender and sexuality already well under way by midcentury.No biographies can save scientific heroes from the fatal charge that their methods and findings were bound up in their lives, or they would not be biographies worth reading. This attests to the stubborn endurance of the psychoanalytic paradigm. Kinsey despised Freud for passing off philosophy as science. Yet because of the conventions of post‐Freudian biography, Gathorne‐Hardy must explore exactly those dimensions of Kinsey's life and character that Freud embraced but that Kinsey himself would never have admitted into the precincts of science. His childhood illnesses and struggles with an overbearing father, his rage against religion, fondness for music, charismatic yet autocratic style, and his own anguished sexuality are keys to puzzling out not only a life in science, but a life.Gathorne‐Hardy can hardly ignore evidence that Kinsey's own sexual appetites were diverse—“bisexual” is this author's preferred designation—or that his enterprise in sex research involved experimentation: the mostly married male members of Kinsey's team were expected to engage in sexual activities with one another and one another's wives. Kinsey's wife Clara was a confidant and supporter from the start. Their loving marriage was also an open marriage. Mac was a participant‐observer in the world of sex research. She had a series of affairs with Kinsey's colleagues and even changed the bedsheets during energetic sessions of sexual cinematography that took place in the attic of their home. Yet the Kinseys also shielded their children from their own unorthodox sexual practices.This biography concludes by suggesting that Kinsey died tragically in 1957, convinced that his enemies had the upper hand. Kinsey was wrong. The diversity he championed has become a theoretical staple in the human and life sciences as well as a practical goal in social policies related to gender, race, and sexuality. However unfinished it may be, it is difficult to imagine Kinsey's revolution being reversed in either science or society. (shrink)

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This (...) article offers the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

First published in Great Britain in 1948, this book examines the definition of goodness as being distinct from the question of _What things are good?_ Although less immediately and obviously practical, Dr. Ewing argues that the former question is more fundamental since it raises the issue of whether ethics is explicable wholly in terms of something else, for example, human psychology. Ewing states in his preface that the definition of goodness needs to be confirmed before one decides on the place (...) value is to occupy in our conception of reality or on the ultimate characteristics which make one action right and another wrong. This book discusses these issues. (shrink)

First published in Great Britain in 1948, this book examines the definition of goodness as being distinct from the question of _What things are good?_ Although less immediately and obviously practical, Dr. Ewing argues that the former question is more fundamental since it raises the issue of whether ethics is explicable wholly in terms of something else, for example, human psychology. Ewing states in his preface that the definition of goodness needs to be confirmed before one decides on the place (...) value is to occupy in our conception of reality or on the ultimate characteristics which make one action right and another wrong. This book discusses these issues. (shrink)

First published in 1934, this book evaluates the characteristic doctrines of the idealism which dominated philosophy during the last century. It seeks to combine realism, as to epistemology and physical objects, with a greater appreciation of views which emphasize the unity and rationality of the universe. This work is not a history and does not try to compete with any histories of idealism but it instead reaches an independent conclusion on certain philosophical problems by criticising what others have said. The (...) book considers differing arguments in order to determine their validity. (shrink)

First published in 1924, this book examines one of the main philosophical debates of the period. Focusing on Kant’s proof of causality, A.C. Ewing promotes its validity not only for the physical but also for the "psychological" sphere. The subject is of importance, for the problem of causality for Kant constituted the crucial test of his philosophy, the most significant of the Kantian categories. The author believes that Kant’s statement of his proof, while too much bound up with other parts (...) of his particular system of philosophy, may be restated "in a form which it can stand by itself and make a good claim for acceptance on all schools of thought". (shrink)

First Published in 1951, this outline work on the theory of knowledge and metaphysics in intended both for university students who have recently started on the subject and for any who, without having the advantage of studying it at University, wish by private reading to acquire a general idea of its nature. The book deals with all the main questions arising within the field in so far as they can be stated and discussed profitably and simply. The topics discussed include (...) the place of reason in knowledge and life, the possibility of knowledge beyond sense-experiene, the theory of perception, the relation of body and mind, alleged philosophical implications of recent scientific doctrines, the problem of evil and the existence of God. (shrink)

I think it is clear that we must not take partial determination as meaning that our free acts consist of two parts, one of which is completely determined and the other not influenced by causation at all. Apart from the difficulty of carrying out such a division in detail, there is the fatal objection that we could in that case not even regard it as more probable than not that a person who had shown high moral character would continue to (...) do so as regards any future free action. For the only free, and therefore the only moral part of his action, would be one with which causation had nothing to do. Nor could we suppose that the free part of his action was at all influenced by motives, even the motive of regard for the moral law. For influence involves partial causation. (shrink)

In 1937, just as Dobzhansky published the book that later generations would laud as the foundation of the modern synthesis, the American Naturnlist published a symposium on "supraspecific variation in nature and in classification." Alfred C. Kinsey, who later became one of America's most controversial intellectuals for his study of basic behaviors in another sort of WASP,1 led off the symposium with a summary of his extensive work on a family of gall wasps, the Cynipidae. In his article, (...) Kinsey strongly advocated the central theme of the developing synthesis: Evolution at all scales, particularly macroevolution, could be explained by the genetic mechanisms observed in laboratories and local populations. He first complained that some geneticists and naturalists were still impeding a synthesis with their insistence upon causal separation of levels: "Just as some of the geneticists have insisted that the laboratory genetics may explain the nature and origin of Mendelian races, but not of natural species, so others indicate that the qualities of higher categories must be explained on bases other than those involved in species" (1937, p. 208). He then defended the central postulate. (shrink)

We show that if T is a trivial uncountably categorical theory of Morley Rank 1 then T is model complete after naming constants for a model.

• Aggregates of previously isolated cells of Hydra are capable, under suitable solvant conditions, of regeneration forming complete animals. In a first stage, ecto- and endodermal cells sort out, producing the bilayered hollow structure characteristic of Hydra tissue; thereafter, heads are formed (even if the original cell preparation contained no head cells), eventually leading to the separation of normal animals with head, body column and foot. Hydra appears to be the highest type of organism that allows for regeneration of the (...) entire structure from random cell aggregates. The system is particularly useful for studying cell interactions, tissue polarity, pattern formation, and cell differentiation. (shrink)

On the basis of the characterization of autonomy set out by Beauchamp and Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, we first explore some of the parameters along which autonomy may vary in degree through a series of hypothetical examples drawn from various settings; and, second and in more detail, we examine how the range of autonomy is affected through informed consent to various medical diagnostic tests. Our conclusions are (1) that there are significant implications for patient autonomy inherent in new (...) and forthcoming diagnostic modalities, and (2) that attention should be paid to these implications in formulating policies for both clinical practice and research. We close with (a) some specific policy recommendations for clinical practice and research, and (b) some metaphysical speculations raised by our explorations. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1989, contains a spirited debate between eminent economists, journalists, and publishers about the spread of economic ideas. Using many of the same ideas as do the rhetorical and sociological philosophical schools, the contributors to this book discuss the spread of economic ideas in readily understandable English. The examination of the flow of ideas among economists and from economists to the public is followed by a discussion of the public policy use and abuse of these concepts. (...) A final section provides insights into the funding of ideas and the incentives to make economics more relevant. The dialogue among the book's contributors provides both the lay reader and the interested professional with fascinating insights into what happens behind the scenes in academia, publishing, and journalism. (shrink)