In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes's Conception of Perfect Knowledge WILLIS DONEY IN THEFIFTHMEDITATION, after presenting his a priori argument for the existence of God, Descartes compares the certainty of his conclusion with the c~rtainty of conclusions of mathematical demonstrations. In stating the view that Descartes expresses here, I shall use letters: D for the conclusion of his a priori argument, ttamely, that there is a God, and R for an example that (...) he gives of a conclusion that he has reached in mathematics, that is, the proposition that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Concerning the certainty of D and R, he maintains in the Fifth Meditation that he is as certain of D as of "anything else that seems most certain," implying that D is for him as cea-tain as R; and he goes on to make what is clearly intended to be a stronger claim: I also observe that the certainty of other things so depends on this that without it nothing can ever be perfectly known,x This claim is repeated, by way of a conclusion, in the next to the last sentence of the Meditation: And so I clearly see that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends on an apprehension of the true God, in such a fashion that, before I knew him, I could have no perfect knowledge of anything else.2 i AT VII, 69; HR I, 183. "AT" stands for the edition of Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, (Euvres de Descartes (Paris: L~.opold Cerf, 1897-1913); "'HR" for the English translation by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931). In quotations I have departed from HR to avoid infeficities or inaccuracies. The Latin locution translated "perfec0y known" is perfecte sciri; in the French translation, sfauoir parfaitement is used (AT IX, 55). This is the first occurrence of this locution in the Meditations. 2 AT VII, 71; HR I, 185. The Latin locution in the last clause is perfecte scire; the F~-ench is, again, s~auoir parfaitement (AT IX, 56). In HR there is vacillation in the translation of scientia. In these passages in the Fifth Meditation, scientia and cognitio are both rendered "knowledge"; whereas, in the Replies to the Second Set of Obj~cttons, vera scientia is "true science" (AT VII, 141; HR II, 39). For scientiae certitudinem & veritatem, I have used "certainty and truth of knowledge," and "apprehension of the true God" for veri dei cognitione. [3S7] 388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In these sentences, Descartes does not limit his claims about certainty and perfect knowledge to propositions Like R, and one of his contemporaries, taking him to be asserting that, unless a person has knowledge of God's existence, he cannot be certain of anything else, raised the objection that, earlier in the Meditations, Descartes claimed to be certain of his own existence as a thinking thing prior to having proved the existence of God) In his reply, Descartes accused his critic of misreading what he had written in the Fifth Meditation. The claim that he made there was not about all propositions---about principles and evident propositions, such as ego cogito, ergo sum and sum res eogitans, as well as propositions like Rmbut specificaUy and exclusively about propositions like R.* Whether, when confronted with his critic's objection, Descartes retracted or modified a view expressed in the Meditations is a question on which sides have been taken. In my paper I have something to say about this question, but I shall be concerned primarily with a problem of interpretation that arises whether or not we take Descartes at his word; that is, whether we take the claim that he makes in the Fifth Meditation to be exclusively about propositions like R or, contrary to Descartes's reply to his critic, to be about other propositions as well. The problem arises when we try to make sense of what he says in the Fifth Meditation in support of this claim. In the first part of my paper, I shall pose the problem, pointing out that, on a very tempting and prima facie... (shrink)

How does Locke contribute to the development of 18th-century projects for a science of the mind, even though he seems to reject or at least bracket off such an idea himself? Contrary to later understandings of empiricism, Locke goes out of his way to state that his project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2). Locke further specifies that this (...) means his analysis of mental processes will not engage with knowledge of the brain (e.g. in terms of corpuscles and animal spirits), even though he had been the student of Thomas Willis. Now, Kant seemed to make an elementary mistake, given such a clear statement on Locke’s part, when he claimed that Locke’s project was a “physiology of the understanding” (in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). One can ask of course what this physiology of the understanding was, and if it existed, in or out of the Lockean intellectual world (as I have sought to investigate in a 2016 paper). This leads me to inquire into the outcome of his empiricism for a scientific treatment of the mind, including in the sense of a ‘naturalization’ of the mind (with implications also for our understanding of empiricism: Anstey’s influential distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy does not seem useful here). Because if Kant made this charge, there were also many 18th-century thinkers who positively treated Locke as their great forerunner in psychology and related fields: Charles Bonnet and Joseph Priestley among them, just as some prominent physicians such as Cabanis claimed to be ‘finishing the job’ that Locke had started in, e.g. their materialist theories of the passions. What one might term ‘the Locke Problem’ here is: how can one reconcile empiricism and claims about cerebral processes, while seeking to remain a Lockean? Differently put, what is the process of naturalization, a naturalization of? (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus (and lesser-known figures in the decades prior), and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz and Stahl in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the (...) discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore striking that the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution conspicuously avoid any consideration of what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe (I discuss this in Wolfe 2011, 2019 chapt. 1). Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this chapter I seek to establish how something we might call ‘the knowledge of Life’, to use an expression of Georges Canguilhem’s, emerged as part of early modernity without being part of the mainstream history of life science. This leads to the question, can one can correlate early modern “knowledge of life” with the emergence of a science called ‘biology’? (see Zammito 2018, Wolfe 2019, Bognon-Küss and Wolfe eds. 2019). It was once fashionable to speak of, e.g. ‘precursors of Darwin’, and then Canguilhem and Foucault famously did away with the category of precursor. But how then do we account for the phase that precedes the constitution of a science? With the case of biology, how do we account for the increasing fascination with the ontology of Life during the decades prior to the ‘naming of biology’, as McLaughlin has called it, at the end of the eighteenth century? This increased focus on Life and the ontology of Life sits awkwardly, both with mainstream narratives of the Scientific Revolution and of the history of biology. In seeking to address this increased focus (in which vitalism plays a role but was by no means the only conceptual actor: Wolfe 2020), I critically examine Foucault’s notorious claim (Foucault 1966) that there was no such thing as ‘Life’ in the eighteenth century and thus no such thing as biology. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early (...) modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories. (shrink)

Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have (...) sought to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth century. Relatively (...) few works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

"Charles "Teenie" Harris photographed the events and daily life of African Americans for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers. From the 1930s to 1970s, Harris created a richly detailed record of public personalities, historic events, and the lives of average people. In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art purchased Harris's archive of nearly 80,000 photographic negatives, few of which are titled and dated; the archive is considered one of the most important documentations of 20th?century African (...) American life. The book will serve as the definitive publication on the life and work of Teenie Harris, consisting of three significant essays: Cheryl Finley, assistant professor in the history of art at Cornell University, offers the first thorough analysis of Harris as an artist, situating him within the history of 20th?century African American art as well as American documentary and vernacular photography; Larry Glasco, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, draws on new research to present a detailed biography of the photographer; and Joe Trotter, professor of history and social justice at Carnegie Mellon University, explores the social and historical context of Harris's photographs. The book will also include a foreword by Deborah Willis, professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In addition to comparative illustrations within the essays, the book includes 100 plates of Harris's signature work and a complete bibliography and chronology"--. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the following quotation from Charles Peirce: "One of these days, perhaps, there will come a writer of opinions less humdrum than those of Dr. (Alfred Russel) Wallace, and less in awe of the learned and official world...who will argue, like a new Bernard Mandeville, that man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoic talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them 'civilization,' and who, in place of the unerring instincts (...) of other races, has an unhappy faculty for occupying himself with words and abstractions, and for going wrong in a hundred ways before he is driven, willy-nilly, into the right one. Dr. Wallace would condemn such an extravagant paradoxer." Charles Peirce, 1901 -/- . (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused university education to transition from face-to-face contacts to virtual learning environments. Young adults were forced to live an entirely new life online, without valuable and enjoyable social interaction. We examined subjective perspectives towards life online during the pandemic. We identified four viewpoints about life mediated by computers. Two viewpoints express “struggling”: Viewpoint 1 (Angry, Depressed and Overwhelmed), and Viewpoint 3 (Restricted to and Overwhelmed by Virtuality). A third feeling-state conveys experiences of “surviving”: Viewpoint 4 (Isolated and (...) Powerless in Convenience). Surprisingly, Viewpoint 2 is about “thriving” (Comfortable and Convenient Routine with Computers). The research shows that virtualization, confinement, and anxiety are taking a toll on the mental health of some members of the younger generation, while at the same time other members feel they are thriving in a situation of limited resources, virtuality, and reduced face-to-face human interaction. (shrink)

This article explores staff work patterns in an Australian residential aged care facility and the implications for high‐quality care. Rarely available minute by minute, time and motion, and ethnographic data demonstrate that nurses and care staff engage in high degrees of multitasking and mental switching between residents. Mental switching occurs up to 18 times per hour (every 3 min); multitasking occurs on average for 37 min/h. Labor process theory is used to examine these outcomes and to explore the concepts of (...) high demand and high commitment as core components of work intensification. These conditions of work result in high levels of cognitive burden and stress on staff in managing the multitasking and mental switching, exacerbated by lack of knowledge about residents associated with labor force casualization. These new interpretations of data in relation to mental and manual labor can contribute to understanding, and, therefore, problem solving, in the aged care sector. (shrink)

Este ensayo considera el tema de sabotaje en Hitchcock, en especial su película británica Sabotaje, en términos de la teoría silogística de Manuel Asensi. También analiza temas subversivos semejantes en dos obras contemporáneas, Malditos bastardos de Quentin Tarantino y Volver de Pedro Almodóvar. Los sabotajes literales en la película de Hitchcock (la colocación de bombas en relación con el cine) se combinan con la matanza de un esposo (tratándole como un pedazo de carne) para figurar un cine radical no solo (...) como un arte anti-aurético (en el sentido del arte mecánicamente reproducido de Walter Benjamin) sino también como un texto atético, en términos de Asensi, para desconstruir el silogismo entimemático que informa el modelo del mundo (la sociedad y la política son como una obra artística de formas puras) al fondo del fascismo histórico. Malditos bastardos y Volver van más allá de Sabotaje de Hitchcock al ofrecer un hospedaje al subalterno en pos de los silogismos saboteados. La crítica como sabotaje nos ayuda a ver la dimensión subversiva de estas y otras películas. Al mismo tiempo, el análisis de los sabotajes cinematográficos pone en relieve el impacto político de la teoría de Asensi de la crítica como sabotaje.El fondo teórico de este artículo es el libro Crítica y sabotaje de Manuel Asensi que demuestra que las obras literarias y fílmicas tienen una función performativa. Son discursos que modelizan sujetos en el mundo. Tales modelizaciones ocurren de una manera inconsciente puesto que cada discurso contiene un silogismo que implica un modelo del mundo. La crítica como sabotaje es un instrumento para revelar estos silogismos modelizantes escondidos en las obras. Algunos textos como las películas estudiadas en este artículo explícitamente sabotean los modelos del mundo que históricamente han servido para reprimirnos, de modo que la crítica como sabotaje se une a la visión de Walter Benjamin del arte nuevo capaz de estallar el aura (los valores del culto inseparables del fascismo) asociado con el arte clásico. El cine para Benjamin, siendo un arte mecánicamente reproducido, ténia esta potencia explosiva. Es precisamente la misma visión saboteadora que encontramos en las películas analizadas en este ensayo. (shrink)

Philosophers of science often make reference — whether tacitly or explicitly — to the notion of a scientific community. Sometimes, such references are useful to make our object of analysis tractable in the philosophy of science. For others, tracking or understanding particular features of the development of science proves to be tied to notions of a scientific community either as a target of theoretical or social intervention. We argue that the structure of contemporary scientific research poses two unappreciated, or at (...) least underappreciated, challenges to this concept of the “scientific community” in the philosophy of science. In particular, we will present two case studies from robotics research, broadly construed, which show that (1) the boundedness of the scientific community is threatened when private citizens can develop scientific and technological advances at minimal expense (democratization), and (2) the discreteness of scientific research programs is threatened by the complexly interrelated environment of contemporary scientific work (interconnectivity). Taken together, the extent of democratization and interconnectivity present a significant challenge for any practically oriented philosophy of science, one which we hope will be taken on directly by philosophers in the future. (shrink)

We present, in various limits, analytical expressions for the center-of-mass wave function of a spin-1/2 atom as it is deflected by a Stern-Gerlach apparatus.

Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something.

Australia, along with other countries, has introduced New Public Management (NPM) into public sector hospitals in an effort to contain healthcare costs. NPM is associated with outsourcing of service provision, the meeting of government performance indicators, workforce flexibility and rationing of resources. This study explores the impact of rationing of staffing and other resources upon delivery of care outside of business hours. Data was collected through semistructured interviews conducted with 21 nurses working in 2 large Australian metropolitan hospitals. Participants identified (...) four strategies associated with NPM which add to workload after‐hours and impacted on the capacity to deliver nursing care. These were functional flexibility, vertical substitution of staff, meeting externally established performance indicators and outsourcing. We conclude that cost containment alongside of the meeting of performance indicators has extended work traditionally performed during business hours beyond those hours when less staffing and material resources are available. This adds to nursing workload and potentially contributes to incomplete nursing care. (shrink)

Many organisms possess multiple sensory systems, such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The possession of multiple ways of sensing the world offers many benefits. However, combining information from different senses also poses many challenges for the nervous system. In recent years there has been dramatic progress in understanding how information from the different senses gets integrated in order to construct useful representations of external space. This volume brings together the leading researchers from a broad range of scientific approaches (...) to present the first overview of this central topic in cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse’s political-philosophical vision, cultural critique, and social activism continue to offer an intelligent strategic perspective on current concerns – especially issues of ecological destruction, neofascist white supremacy, hate speech, hate crimes, and racist police violence. These can be countered through a recognition of the intersectionality of radical needs of diverse constituencies and radical collaboration, giving rise to system negation as a new general interest, and an ecosocialist strategy of revolutionary activism within a global alliance of transformational forces.

Aristotle initiated the systematic investigation of perception, the emotions, memory, desire, and action. David Charles argues that Aristotle's account of these phenomena is a philosophically live alternative to conventional modern thinking about the mind: it offers a way to dissolve, rather than solve, the mind-body problem we have inherited.

This paper provides a reconstruction and analysis of Marx’s early engagements with logic, and especially his studies of Hegel’s logic, on the one hand, and Hegel’s great if often overlooked critic Adolf Trendelenburg, on the other. It itemises the archival evidence that Marx read and planned to compose a Hegelian response to Trendelenburg’s devastating attack on dialectics in his 1840 Logische Untersuchungen – the work that arguably did more than any other single text to destroy the influence of Hegelianism among (...) German intellectuals at the time. It argues that the young Marx was a more sophisticated reader of Hegel and of philosophy in general than is typically acknowledged. Against the backdrop of these claims, it then proposes a new reading of Marx’s work from 1839 to 1842 – one that takes the emphasis off the familiar distinction between materialism and idealism, which was as much an invention of Engels’s later interpretations of the early Marx as it was an invention of Marx himself, and places it instead on what early nineteenth-century thinkers would have understood to be the more comprehensive question of logic. (shrink)

Mill’s claim that representative government can be democratic, and as such “the ideally best form of government”, rests on the virtues of public deliberation, which he sees both as a means for pursuing just political decisions and as a means of participation for the widest citizenry. His view has been criticized, by Schmitt in particular, for assuming that free discussion can dissolve the conflict of social forces and that it leads to the discovery of the truth. But does it really (...) depend on such premises? The focus of the paper is the tension between the search for truth and the need for inclusion in Mill’s theory of representative government. An examination of the role played by freedom of discussion suggests that far from sublimating social conflict or guaranteeing the correctness of political decisions, the deliberative process regulates the conflict of opinions, understood as a violent struggle over truth, on an egalitarian basis. (shrink)