In this first volume of original essays on rhetorical criticism to appear in many years, the authors stress active engagement in the critical process. Bearing in mind the complaint frequently leveled at rhetorical criticism—that method as method has taken precedence over understanding and appreciation—the editors encouraged innovation, and the contributors responded by moving beyond the merely theoretical to explore implications through implied criticism, participating in the activity rather than merely talking about it. Consequently, these essays avoid further lamentation over the (...) current state of the art and concentrate instead on constructive presentations. Not only do the essays add significantly to knowledge about rhetorical criticism, but they also serve liberal education by helping to bring understanding, discrimination, and appreciation to the entire process of human communication. (shrink)

The business enterprise is a major instrument in the creation of a just society. However the tension between profit and ethicality requires sound decision making and business ethics instruction is central to creative alternatives to business leaders. Therefore, instruction is aided with a model for framing one’s thoughts about ethics and while several earlier business ethics models exist, they tend to be closed and at times parochial. This paper draws on insights from other academic disciplines to offer a broader yet (...) flexible framework for professors, students, scholars, and decision makers. At the center of the model is the four stage framework of Rest et al. as impacted by four sets of variables—individual, organizational, environmental, and issue. These are rooted in the work of Dunlop’s Industrial Relations Theory and Jones’ Moral Intensity. A literature review of important variables is presented and the paper concludes with several take aways for instruction and policy suggestions. (shrink)

Most of us came into ecology with memories of special personal places. A cliff top that Claude Monet might have painted. Allen as a youth spent his holidays on the Dorset Coast near Swanage; he can still smell the sea breeze of his childhood. Curtin grow up on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the dew of the grass and the bright green on a June morning remains vivid. The catching of reptiles and insects for him awakened a curiosity about the (...) natural world that has remained to this day. But once into the field there came the scholarship. With ever tighter grant monies, the pressure to publish takes so much of the fun out of it. A climate of unbridled careerism prevails and shows itself in the incremental state of the literature: little things to list on this year's activities report. There are now even predatory journals that cynically do not seriously review submissions, and only collect page charges. As journal editors have a desperate time getting reviews done by mature scholars, instead of a hand off to their overworked graduate students. So what is to be done - how can we bring the joy and importance of discovery back into it all? After all ecology is done by human beings. Mostly it is a personal mission, for what great ecologists write is frequently personal and life changing. So an undercurrent of this book is to remind and reveal the original purpose of science. Not professional advancement, but the genuine search for novel ideas and the imperative to share hard won insights and personal passions. (shrink)

There seems to be a view that intuitionists not only take the Axiom of Choice (AC) to be true, but also believe it a consequence of their fundamental posits. Widespread or not, this view is largely mistaken. This article offers a brief, yet comprehensive, overview of the status of AC in various intuitionistic and constructivist systems. The survey makes it clear that the Axiom of Choice fails to be a theorem in most contexts and is even outright false in some (...) important contexts. Of the systems surveyed, only intensional type theory renders AC a theorem, but the extent of AC in that theory does not include, for instance, real analysis. Only a small amount of extensionality is required in order for the obvious proof an intuitionist might offer for AC to break down. (shrink)

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., (...) daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories. (shrink)

We show that the implicational fragment of intuitionism is the weakest logic with a non-trivial probabilistic semantics which satisfies the thesis that the probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities. We also show that several logics between intuitionism and classical logic also admit non-trivial probability functions which satisfy that thesis. On the other hand, we also prove that very weak assumptions concerning negation added to the core probability conditions with the restriction that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities are sufficient to (...) trivialize the semantics. (shrink)

Conclusions reached using common sense reasoning from a set of premises are often subsequently revised when additional premises are added. Because we do not always accept previous conclusions in light of subsequent information, common sense reasoning is said to be nonmonotonic. But in the standard formal systems usually studied by logicians, if a conclusion follows from a set of premises, that same conclusion still follows no matter how the premise set is augmented; that is, the consequence relations of standard logics (...) are monotonic. Much recent research in AI has been devoted to the attempt to develop nonmonotonic logics. After some motivational material, we give four formal proofs that there can be no nonmonotonic consequence relation that is characterized by universal constraints on rational belief structures. In other words, a nonmonotonic consequence relation that corresponds to universal principles of rational belief is impossible. We show that the nonmonotonicity of common sense reasoning is a function of the way we use logic, not a function of the logic we use. We give several examples of how nonmonotonic reasoning systems may be based on monotonic logics. (shrink)

In [2] Hempel and Oppenheim give a definition of “explanation” for a certain formal language. In [1] Eberle, Kaplan, and Montague prove five theorems demonstrating that the Hempel and Oppenheim definition is not restrictive enough. In [3] Kim proposes two further conditions to supplement the Hempel and Oppenheim definition in order to avoid the objections posed in [1]. In this paper it is shown that the definition of Hempel and Oppenheim supplemented by Kim's conditions is open to a trivialization very (...) analogous to that given in [1]. (shrink)

Abstract The increasing prevalence of armed drones in the conduct of military operations has generated robust debate. Among legal scholars, the crux of the dispute generally pits those who herald the new technology's unparalleled precision against those who view such newfound capabilities as an inducement to employ excessive force. Largely overlooked in the discussion over how drone strikes can be accomplished lawfully is a more fundamental question: Can a model of warfare that eschews any risk of harm to one party (...) be squared with the ethical framework that informs the law of war? This matter has less to do with the technology per se than with a policy orientation that utilizes such technology as a strategy in itself, as opposed to one military tool in a larger arsenal. A corollary to the incongruity of riskless warfare is to query whether the ensuing breakdown of ethical and legal norms unwittingly encourages the very instability that the law of war attempts to control, thereby endangering the civilian populations of all parties to the conflict. While other authors have previously addressed the challenges posed by asymmetry to the law of armed conflict in different formats, this article explores these issues through a hypothetical scenario and seeks to elucidate some of the potential ramifications of the pursuit of physical impunity in war. (shrink)

In a curious turn of phrase that he offered to a particular congregation, Augustine claims that a belch became the Gospel: “Ipsa ructatio euangelium est.” The reference comes at the end of a longer digression in Sermon (s.) 341 [Dolbeau 22] about how John the Evangelist, a fisherman, came to produce his Gospel, namely he belched out what he drank in. The use of a mundane word like ructare in an oration concerning a divine being contravenes a rhetorical prohibition known (...) as tapinosis. This kind of speech was prohibited in ancient oratory because it humiliated the subject of the declamation, and this was especially problematic if the subject was divine. According to Augustine’s reading of scripture, if the divine willfully chose to be humiliated in order to teach humility to others by example, then the person delivering a speech about the divine could contravene this oratorical vice. This article argues that Augustine does precisely that in s. 341 by examining the reasons for Augustine’s use of the terms ructare and iumentum. Specifically, it traces their usage in various Latin texts from Cicero to Plautus to the Psalms. It argues that the virtue of humility is manifest in the very language which Augustine deploys all along the way. (shrink)

In a curious turn of phrase that he offered to a particular congregation, Augustine claims that a belch became the Gospel: “Ipsa ructatio euangelium est.” The reference comes at the end of a longer digression in Sermon 341 [Dolbeau 22] about how John the Evangelist, a fisherman, came to produce his Gospel, namely he belched out what he drank in. The use of a mundane word like ructare in an oration concerning a divine being contravenes a rhetorical prohibition known as (...) tapinosis. This kind of speech was prohibited in ancient oratory because it humiliated the subject of the declamation, and this was especially problematic if the subject was divine. According to Augustine’s reading of scripture, if the divine willfully chose to be humiliated in order to teach humility to others by example, then the person delivering a speech about the divine could contravene this oratorical vice. This article argues that Augustine does precisely that in s. 341 by examining the reasons for Augustine’s use of the terms ructare and iumentum. Specifically, it traces their usage in various Latin texts from Cicero to Plautus to the Psalms. It argues that the virtue of humility is manifest in the very language which Augustine deploys all along the way. (shrink)

Modern cells present no signs of a putative prebiotic RNA world. However, RNA coding is not a sine qua non for the accumulation of catalytic polypeptides. Thus, cellular proteins spontaneously fold into active structures that are resistant to proteolysis. The law of mass action suggests that binding domains are stabilized by specific interactions with their substrates. Random polypeptide synthesis in a prebiotic world has the potential to initially produce only a very small fraction of polypeptides that can fold spontaneously into (...) catalytic domains. However, that fraction can be enriched by proteolytic activities that destroy the unfolded polypeptides and regenerate amino acids that can be recycled into polypeptides. In this open system scenario the stable domains that accumulate and the chemical environment in which they are accumulated are linked through self coding of polypeptide structure. Such open polypeptide systems may have been the precursors to the cellular ribonucleoprotein (RNP) world that evolved subsequently. (shrink)

Since essence examined from one point of view can always be dissolved into relationship, and since the act of this dissolution—which is the general analyzing act of science—seems at first to explain the essence or transcending cause, therefore in every science and with every such new discovery of material determining agents, there will be a period of enthusiasm when real explanation and cause seem to be revealed. But after the discovered relationship has been examined for a time, it becomes apparent (...) both that further unexplored relationships are required to connect these agents we have found with the operations they are supposed to effect, and that a new transcendental unity must be postulated of the whole to bind the agents into the ordered pattern they maintain. (shrink)

Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene(1) quite aptly applies the term “selfish” to parasitic repetitive DNA sequences endemic to eukaryotic genomes, especially vertebrates. Doolittle and Sapienza(2) as well as Orgel and Crick(3) enlivened this notion of selfish DNA with the identification of such repetitive sequences as remnants of mobile elements such as transposons. In addition, Orgel and Crick(3) associated parasitic DNA with a potential to outgrow their host genomes by propagating both vertically via conventional genome replication as well as infectiously (...) by horizontal gene transfer (HGT) to other genomes. Still later, Doolittle(4) speculated that unchecked HGT between unrelated genomes so complicates phylogeny that the conventional representation of a tree of life would have to be replaced by a thicket or a web of life.(4) In contrast, considerable data now show that reconstructions based on whole genome sequences are consistent with the conventional “tree of life”.(5–10) Here, we identify natural barriers that protect modern genome populations from the inroads of rampant HGT. BioEssays 27:741–747, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The usual semantics for the modal systems T, S4, and S5 assumes that the set of possible worlds contains at least one member. Recently versions of these modal systems have been developed in which this assumption is dropped. The systems discussed here are obtained by slightly weakening the liberated versions of T and S4. The semantics does not assume the existence of possible worlds, and the accessibility relation between worlds is only required to be quasi-reflexive instead of reflexive. Completeness and (...) independence results are established. (shrink)

“Die Geheimnisse der Vorväter”: Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentierung einer esoterischen mandäischen Handschrift aus der Bodleian Library Oxford. By Bogdan Burtea. Mandäistische Forschungen, vol. 5. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015. Pp. 153, illus. €49.

Nicht nur mit Engelszungen: Beiträge zur semitischen Dialektologie—Festschrift für Werner Arnold zum 60. Geburtstag. Edited by Renaud Kuty; Ulrich Seeger; and Shabo Talay. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xx + 412. €118.

Neuaramäische Texte in den Dialekten der Khabur-Assyrer in Nordostsyrien. By Shabo Talay. Semitica Viva, vol. 41. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009. Pp. xv + 712. €148.

Prostitution in the Eastern Mediterranean World: The Economics of Sex in the Late Antique and Medieval Middle East. By Gary Leiser. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Pp. xv + 332. $52.50, £35.