The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin explores how Le Guins fiction and essays have built a speculative ethical practice engaging indigenous knowledge and feminism, while crafting utopias in which human and other-than-human life forms enter into new relations. Her work also delineates new ways of making sense of the "science" of science fiction. The authors of this collection provide up-to-date discussions of well-known works as well as more experimental writings. Written in an accessible style, Legacies will appeal to any (...) readers interested in literature, science fiction and fantasy, as well as specialists of science and technology studies, philosophy of science, ethics, gender studies, indigenous studies and posthumanism."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Existing (...) OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing a process of coordinated reform and new ontologies being created on the basis of an evolving set of shared principles governing ontology development. The result is an expanding family of ontologies designed to be interoperable, logically well-formed, and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality. We describe the OBO Foundry initiative, and provide guidelines for those who might wish to become involved. (shrink)

Ethics is an unconventional field of research for a surgeon, as ethics in surgery owns several specificities and surgery is considered an aggressive specialty. Therefore, the interest of research in medical ethics is sometimes unclear.In this short essay, we discussed the interest of research in medical ethics using a comparison to thermodynamics and mainly, entropy. During the transformation of a figure from one state to another, some energy is released or absorbed; yet, a part of this energy is wasted because (...) of “unordered” reactions: it is Entropy.This “wasted energy” exists in Medical practice and justifies research in Medical ethics. (shrink)

New concepts may prove necessary to profit from the avalanche of sequence data on the genome, transcriptome, proteome and interactome and to relate this information to cell physiology. Here, we focus on the concept of large activity-based structures, or hyperstructures, in which a variety of types of molecules are brought together to perform a function. We review the evidence for the existence of hyperstructures responsible for the initiation of DNA replication, the sequestration of newly replicated origins of replication, cell division (...) and for metabolism. The processes responsible for hyperstructure formation include changes in enzyme affinities due to metabolite-induction, lipid-protein affinities, elevated local concentrations of proteins and their binding sites on DNA and RNA, and transertion. Experimental techniques exist that can be used to study hyperstructures and we review some of the ones less familiar to biologists. Finally, we speculate on how a variety of in silico approaches involving cellular automata and multi-agent systems could be combined to develop new concepts in the form of an Integrated cell (I-cell) which would undergo selection for growth and survival in a world of artificial microbiology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 76 Reviews REAPPRAISING GILBERT MURRAY Louis Greenspan Religious Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4k1 [email protected] ChristopherStray,ed.GilbertMurrayReassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xii, 400. £65; £27.50 (pb). Cdn. $156 (hb). us$55 (pb). isbn 978-0-19-920879-1 (hb). For much of the Wrst half of the twentieth century Gilbert Murray was a leading Wgure in (...) British academia, in British theatre, on the British and American lecture circuits and even in British politics. He was admired by the community of scholars as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the most prestigious position in classical scholarship in the English-speaking world. He was also esteemed by a wider reading public as the champion of a magisterial liberalism rooted in classical Greek culture. Finally he was respected by the world at large as a liberal activist who, during World War 1, wrote well-argued pamphlets in support of the war and who later became co-chairman of the League of Nations Union, an organization that in the ’20s and ’30s attracted 400,000 members. Among his companions were George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, both of whom remained his friends for life. As chief editor of the Home University Library he commissioned Russell’s The Problems of Philosophyz, which is still unsurpassed as an introduction to this subject. Today he is forgotten. Younger classical scholars would endorse the statement by Fowler (quoted in this volume): “in spite of his great fame when he was alive, he might never have written, so far as most scholars are concerned today” (p. 58). His role as the public intellectual who connected modern liberalism with Hellenism has been taken over by the followers of Leo Strauss who view this connection rather diTerently than Murray did. As for his liberal activism, when he died in 1957 Murray was regarded aTectionately as a noble ghost of Victorian liberalism past, whose passionate advocacy of the League of Nations was seen as well meaning and futile as the organization he had championed. In the ’60s and ’70s his words and deeds were swept away in the tides of anti-liberal fervour that inspired the newly emerging leftist revolutionaries and neo-conservatives. At Wrst perusal Gilbert Murray Reassessed zhas the format of festschrifts and other scholarly reviews of the accomplishments of a particular writer. There are articles on every aspect of Murray’s activities: his translations of Greek drama, his critical editions of Euripides, his views of Hellenism, his post-World War 1 September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 77 internationalism and even his lectures on the bbc, all by specialists in these topics. But this volume is more than a summing up of Murray’s contributions to scholarship. The aim of the volume is to revive Murray the public intellectual, a voice of liberalism that deserves a new hearing. The book could have been entitled Gilbert Murray Retrieved for Our Timesz: a contribution to the struggle to Wnd a liberalism that addresses the anti-liberal, anti-intellectual forces that threaten us today. In this spirit the volume is dedicated to those who died in the London terrorist attack of July 2005. The volume opens with two sets of memoirs, one by Murray’s grandchildren Ann Pauladan and Alexander Murray, the other Francis West’s account of Murray ’s reXections on an Australian childhood. The memoirs of his grandchildren, aTectionate and charming, seem less interested in refashioning Gilbert Murray for our time. They still portray Murray as one who inhabited a world that is no more, the proponent of a liberalism that was naively optimistic and top heavy with reason at the expense of the emotions. Murray’s optimism is evident in their anecdote about an encounter between Murray and Sir Edward Grey, during a summer walk in 1914. Murray opened the conversation by scoUng at rumours of impending war in Europe, for him impossible between civilized powers. Grey closed it by assuring him that war was certain, thus causing the speechless and horriWed Murray... (shrink)

Natural selection is commonly seen not just as an explanation for adaptive evolution, but as the inevitable consequence of “heritable variation in fitness among individuals”. Although it remains embedded in biological concepts, such a formalisation makes it tempting to explore whether this precondition may be met not only in life as we know it, but also in other physical systems. This would imply that these systems are subject to natural selection and may perhaps be investigated in a biological framework, where (...) properties are typically examined in light of their putative functions. Here we relate the major questions that were debated during a three-day workshop devoted to discussing whether natural selection may take place in non-living physical systems. We start this report with a brief overview of research fields dealing with “life-like” or “proto-biotic” systems, where mimicking evolution by natural selection in test tubes stands as a major objective. We contend the challenge may be as much conceptual as technical. Taking the problem from a physical angle, we then discuss the framework of dissipative structures. Although life is viewed in this context as a particular case within a larger ensemble of physical phenomena, this approach does not provide general principles from which natural selection can be derived. Turning back to evolutionary biology, we ask to what extent the most general formulations of the necessary conditions or signatures of natural selection may be applicable beyond biology. In our view, such a cross-disciplinary jump is impeded by reliance on individuality as a central yet implicit and loosely defined concept. Overall, these discussions thus lead us to conjecture that understanding, in physico-chemical terms, how individuality emerges and how it can be recognised, will be essential in the search for instances of evolution by natural selection outside of living systems. (shrink)

Shaping off-job life is becoming increasingly important for workers to increase and maintain their optimal functioning. Proactively shaping the job domain has been extensively studied, but crafting in the off-job domain has received markedly less research attention. Based on the Integrative Needs Model of Crafting, needs-based off-job crafting is defined as workers’ proactive and self-initiated changes in their off-job lives, which target psychological needs satisfaction. Off-job crafting is posited as a possible means for workers to fulfill their needs and enhance (...) well-being and performance over time. We developed a new scale to measure off-job crafting and examined its relationships to optimal functioning in different work contexts in different regions around the world. Furthermore, we examined the criterion, convergent, incremental, discriminant, and structural validity evidence of the Needs-based Off-job Crafting Scale using multiple methods. The results showed that off-job crafting was related to optimal functioning over time, especially in the off-job domain but also in the job domain. Moreover, the novel off-job crafting scale had good convergent and discriminant validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability. To conclude, our series of studies in various countries show that off-job crafting can enhance optimal functioning in different life domains and support people in performing their duties sustainably. Therefore, shaping off-job life may be beneficial in an intensified and continually changing and challenging working life. (shrink)

Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains. Edited by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) $45.00 and £24.00 cloth, xv + 357 pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christopher Norris IMAGE AND PARABLE: READINGS OF WALTER BENJAMIN Marxist literary criticism is a house with many mansions, most of diem claiming a privileged access to the great central chamber of history and truth. Only the most blinkered polemicist could nowadays attack "Marxist criticism" as if it presented a uniform front or even a clearly delineated target. Differences of oudook have developed to a point where debates within (...) Marxism are often more highly charged and polarized man anything brought to bear by its downright opponents. These differences will seem a crippling liability only from the viewpoint of a hard-line determinist creed which insists both on the rightness of its own reductive methodology and on a one-track notion of historical necessity and reason. The alternative, as New Left theorists have argued, is to examine the diversity of present-day Marxist thinking and show how its manifold traditions take rise from various backgrounds of political and cultural development. Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism is one such attempt to "situate" the work of thinkers like Sartre, Almusser, and Adorno in terms of their beleaguered position as left intellectuals outside the active mainstream of any revolutionary movement.1 Another example is Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology, a book which sets out to rethink the bases of a Marxist-theoretical approach to English literary history.2 Eagleton, like Anderson, takes it as axiomatic that no such critique can get underway without first coming to terms with the problems and dilemmas which others have faced in trying to make new sense of a communal enterprise. For Eagleton this means a diagnostic treatment of the gaps and significant sUences which have marked the texts of those — like Arnold or Leavis — engaged in a class-based mystification ofliterary history and values. The critique extends to what Eagleton sees as the inbuilt problems of a homespun British Marxism, whedier of the crudely determinist variety (Caudwell) or the "left-Leavisite" amalgam of radical mêmes and traditionalist assumptions represented by Raymond Williams. Eagleton's approach lays claim to a power of unmasking die 15 16Philosophy and Literature latent ideology at work both in literary and critical texts. Ramer than simply collapse that distinction — as desired by the current post-structuralists, with whom he is wholly out of sympadiy — Eagleton strives to articulate the different structures and relations of discourse which situate criticism vis-à-vis literary history. He proposes a Marxist "science of the text" which would bring out its ideological modes of production, inscribed in the twists and unconscious blind-spots of meaning where a project comes up against its own impossibility. Criticism "deconstructs" the literary text, but not (like the Yale deconstructors) with a view to breaking down all possible distinctions between literature and commentary, merging both in the infinite freeplay of signs. For Eagleton there is indeed a knowledge of die text which stands at a definite remove from its object, just as literature itself"works" and transforms the raw stuffoflived ideology, mus offering it up to critical knowledge. Eagleton's theory of literary production was worked out in response to a powerful new current of Marxist thought, associated mainly with the French philosopher Louis Akhusser. What mis program involved, very briefly, was a rigorous re-reading of Marx's texts, aimed at defining their precise theoretical structure and die place within mem of such concepts as "knowledge," "ideology," and "structure" itself. Only thus could Marxist science attain the clarity and grasp of its own first principles which would set it apart from other, deviant or "ideological" discourses. This meant drawing a firm critical line (or "epistemological break") between the early, humanist Marx and the later productions —including Das Kapital— where his thought took on the full rigor of its scientific basis. Such a theory, in Althusser^ words, "makes it possible to distinguish a word from a concept, to distinguish the existence or non-existence of a concept behind a word, to discern the existence of a concept by a word's function in the dieoretical discourse...." 3 This structuralist reading of the Marxist text is intended as an immanent critique, a means of salvaging the essential Marx from fhose elements in his... (shrink)

During the 1940s in America, as medicine became more research-focused, medical researcher heroes were described as devotedly pursuing miraculous medicine. At the same time, Hollywood thrived, and films were an effective means to help build the myth of the physician hero. Cinematic techniques, rather than only the narrative, of four films, Dr. Arrowsmith, The Story of Louis Pasteur, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, are discussed to understand how they helped construct the image of the (...) physician hero, both in terms of what they were and what they were not. (shrink)

This review article presents a critical evaluation of Christopher C. Knight’s central ideas expressed in his book entitled “Wrestling with the Divine, Religion, Science and Revelation”. The main position discussed is the one Knight calls sacramental panentheism or pan-sacramentalism. These terms refer to the idea that every natural thing can be the locus of God’s initiative as regards God’s self-communication. Using scientific analogies, one may want to defend the idea that culture offers a kind of possibility-space for revelation to (...) happen, somewhat like ecological niches are possibility-spaces for the evolution of biological species. The article argues that this view is inadequate because it implies that religious faith and its linguistic expression are a somewhat random process, sprouting up in various ways where conditions are favourable. It neglects the characteristic of revelation as a gift: God reaching out to us, not randomly, but intelligently and lovingly. (shrink)

Nous entendons réexaminer tout un pan de l’histoire de la philosophie des sciences en France entre le milieu des années 1930 et l’immédiat après-guerre en nous appuyant sur les activités d’un réseau de scientifiques-philosophes qui s’est constitué autour de Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Louis Destouches et Ferdinand Gonseth après le congrès parisien de philosophie scientifique de septembre 1935. Ce réseau officialise sa rupture avec les positivismes logiques en organisant un colloque à Morgat en septembre 1938. Les activités de ce réseau se (...) concrétisent sous l’Occupation avec la publication en 1942 puis en 1944 de deux fascicules qui offrent une large place aux réflexions de Louis de Broglie, Jean-Louis Destouches et Paulette Destouches-Février en physique théorique, tout en traitant d’autres thématiques telles que le langage et le finalisme. Ces deux fascicules reflètent ponctuellement les engagements de l’un de ses membres, à savoir Jean Mariani, en faveur de la Révolution nationale. Si ce dernier est durement sanctionné à l’automne 1946, l’essentiel de ce réseau continue à jouer un rôle structurant en philosophie des sciences après la guerre et il gagne même en visibilité sur la scène philosophique internationale, grâce au soutien de Ferdinand Gonseth et de Stanislas Dockx. (shrink)

The study of identity crosses all disciplinary borders to address such issues as the multiple interactions of race, class, and gender in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies, postcolonialism and globalization, and the interrelation of nationalism and ethnicity in ethnic and area studies. Identities will help disrupt the cliche-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and problem of subjectivity. Leading scholars in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy explore such topics as "Gypsies" in the Western imagination, the mobilization (...) of the West in Chinese television, the lesbian identity and the woman's gaze in fashion photography, and the regulation of black women's bodies in early 20th-century urban areas. This collection of twenty articles brings together the special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled "Identities" (Summer 1992), two other previously published essays, and five previously published critical responses and rejoinders, all of which is interrogated in two new essays by Michael Gorra and Judith Butler. Contributors include Elizabeth Abel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Akeel Bilgrami, Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Judith Butler, Hazel V. Carby, Xiaomei Chen, Diana Fuss, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Avery Gordon, Michael Gorra, Cheryl Herr, Saree S. Makdisi, Walter Benn Michaels, Christopher Newfield, Gananath Obeyesekere, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri, Katie Trumpener, and Joseph Valente. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue ed. by Matthew Levering and Tom AngierChristopher KaczorThe Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue, edited by Matthew Levering and Tom Angier (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 360 pp.The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue, edited by Matthew Levering and Tom Angier, brings together twelve essays on various aspects of Novak's thought along with a response to each essay by (...) Novak himself. The topics themselves concern whether Jews and Christians worship the same God, suicide, natural law, Pope Pius IX, justice, the sanctity of human life, and supersessionism. Its contributors include senior scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers. Each essay, arising from some aspect of Novak's vast corpus, is replied to by Novak himself. These replies are instructive, for they show a great teacher at work, responding with nuance and charity to criticisms and always moving the conversation forward in illuminative ways.Levering opens the volume with a contribution about Novak as a master of Jewish–Christian dialogue, indeed, "the greatest master of Jewish–Christian dialogue who has ever lived" (1). Levering highlights the intellectual pedigree of Novak, whose teachers included Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leo Strauss, Yves Simon, Louis Dupré, and Germain Grisez. Jews are called to live according to the revelation to which they are accountable. Christians are called to live according to the revelation to which they are accountable. Neither Jews nor Christians should hold the other group accountable for their distinctive revelation, but neither Jews nor Christians should hide or minimize what they have to offer to the other.Princeton's Robert P. George interviews Novak, revealing something of the origin story shaping decades of dialogue between the rabbi and [End Page 299] Catholic interlocutors, perhaps the most influential of which was Germain Grisez, Novak's dissertation director in the early 1970s at Georgetown University and a colleague in founding the "new natural law" school, along with George's own dissertation director, John Finnis.Melanie Barrett's essay highlights the importance of natural law, a key theme in Novak's work, for a pluralistic and secular milieu. She cites him saying, "Jews ought to encourage non-Jews to pray in public in order to show how much they believe the world, including the political order, is dependent on God" (48). Such public prayer creates more opportunity also for Jews to express their faith in public.Invoking Gottlob Frege's distinction between sense and reference, Francis Beckwith tackles the question of whether the Trinitarian God is the same God as the God of Abraham. Cassius Clay and Mohammed Ali have the same reference, though different senses. Like Novak, Beckwith believes Catholics and Jews worship the same God.John Berkman returns to the subject of much of Novak's early writing, suicide. Berkman's chapter seeks to explore the similarities and differences between Jewish and Catholic views on the topic. Novak's dissertation exploration of Plato's, Aquinas's, and Kant's views was supplemented by his experience working as a rabbi and hospital chaplain at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, a facility that specializes in treating mental illness. One of Aquinas's arguments against suicide is that it is contrary to proper love of self. In his response to Berkman's essay, Novak highlights that the command "to love your neighbor as yourself" could mean "as you love yourself" or "as you yourself are loved by God" (118).David Elliot, a former student of Novak's, responds to quasi-Marcionite attacks on the manualist tradition by what might be called the "beige moral theologians" of the 1970s. He highlights Novak's insight that "our terror of God's power is mostly sublimated into our reverence for God's wisdom.... It should reappear only when we are tempted to stand up against God in contempt rather than standing before him in awe" (134).Tom Angier, one editor of The Achievement of David Novak, treats the difference between a more typically Scholastic approach to natural law grounded in metaphysics and Novak's theologically formulated approach. But Novak replies, "I tried to... (shrink)

Der Download enthält die penultimative Fassung (noch unter dem vorläufigen Titel "Molina über Vorsehung und Freiheit"). Diese ausführliche Einleitung zu dem Band "Luis de Molina: Göttlicher Plan und menschliche Freiheit", hg. und übersetzt von C. Jäger, H. Kraml und G. Leibold, Hamburg: Meiner 2018, rekonstruiert auf 165 S. Molinas berühmte Theorie der Willensfreiheit und die Frage ihrer Vereinbarkeit mit göttlichem Vorherwissen und göttlicher Vorsehung. Sie zeichnet wesentliche Stationen der Debatte um den theologischen Determinismus nach, wie sie sich von Augustinus und (...) Boethius über Anselm, Thomas von Aquin, Scotus, Ockham und andere bis zu Molina und von dort bis in die jüngste, vor allem analytische Religionsphilosophie hinein entwickelt. (shrink)

I deploy the sense-reference distinction and its kin from the philosophy of language to answer the question what in constitutional interpretation should, and should not, be able to change after founders adopt a constitutional provision. I suggest that a constitutional expression's reference, but not its sense, can change. Interpreters should thus give founders' assessments of reference only Skidmore-level deference. From this position, I criticize the theories of constitutional interpretation offered by Raoul Berger, Jed Rubenfeld, and Richard Fallon, and apply the (...) theory to whether the Fourteenth Amendment forbids racial segregation in public schools. (shrink)

Spontaneous Histories, Spontaneous Philosophies: Concepts of Science in Academic Training. Science studies and history of science usually focus on exploring scientific research activities. Academic training does not garner much attention by contrast. However, what scientists think and do in the course of research activities is not completely independent of what they once have learned. I suggest that in academic training, beneath everything else, a kind of ‘spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’ (Louis Althusser) is established. Textbooks mark one entry point (...) to approach the concepts of science students are confronted with. As an example, I rely on a chapter on the “history of macroeconomics” from a recent textbook. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 459-460 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Brandt. Philosophie in Bildern: Von Giorgione bis Magritte. Hamburg: Dumont, 2000. Pp. 470. Paper, NP. Reinhard Brandt, professor for Philosophiegeschichte, offers in his latest book a multi-faceted history of philosophy and art through his detailed interpretations of major paintings in the European tradition, beginning with Giorgione's "The Three Philosophers" and a young Raphael's "The Dream (...) of the Knight,"and stretching to René Magritte's "La condition humaine." In these paintings, as Brandt claims, different philosophical positions are expounded, which he then, in the role of interpreter, attempts to elucidate.In the introduction Brandt explains how this paradoxical phenomenon of philosophizing paintings can even exist. That one can find not only philosophical themes but well-wrought positions in such paintings, and, most importantly, not read these positions into them, is shown in more than thirty short essays, spanning from ancient Greek philosophy and literature, through the Renaissance and on to present-day Italian, French, Spanish, and German literature/philosophy. In almost every interpretation, Brandt critically reviews previous research, exposing and correcting some deeply rooted mistakes and constantly providing new impulses; in light of his philosophical-philological method, some major paintings in the European tradition are interpreted anew.His detailed analysis of Raphael's "The School of Athens" forces a persuasive revision of previous interpretations; the sitting figure in the foreground is not, as previously assumed, Heraclitus, but Democritus. On account of this carefully proven and convincing allotment, an unnoticed field of vision is discovered between the materialist and solid-state physicist Democritus, who with the gestus melancholicus is concentrating on a problem, and Plato, standing perpendicularly over him. Could this problem be the stone cube, on which the philosopher is leaning? From this conjecture we now have a bridge leading to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melancholia."Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" is interpreted anew on account of the surprising solution to the painting's puzzling construction. Brandt shows that the whole picture is viewed from the vantage point of the princess inside the painting, not of an observer outside it. The princess stands before a mirror and Velazquez paints everything exactly as the princess sees it. So the painting, which hangs in the Prado Museum, is the mirror image of a complete reflection of the Self; perhaps it is no coincidence that the painting belongs to the same historical period as Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum dictum. Or Jacques Louis David's "The Death of Socrates": although the painting has been correctly referred back to Plato's Phaidon, until now a Platonic ground position was falsely attributed to the painting. Brandt shows that the painting was conceived with Stoic philosophical positions in mind: death is portrayed as immanently present, coupled with the un-Socratic maxim mortem spernere. The virtuous stance that Socrates still shows on the threshold of death is decisive. And as an added bonus he includes his influential, previously published essay on the title-page emblem of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is Brandt's technical know-how. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the European intellectual tradition with a [End Page 459] fluid, easy-to-read style, which not only instructs the reader, but entertains as well. At no time does this book approach mere philosophical pedantry; his treatment of some of the lesser known, albeit important, figures in the history of philosophy, e.g., Justus Lipsius and Diogenes of Sinope, is not a lesson in obscurity. The reader feels himself taken on a journey through a history of Western philosophy, always being provided with thought-provoking material. His style, however, is in no way used to mask the often shaky scholarship that has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with such interdisciplinary studies. In every essay Brandt exhausts all the sources; he works with razor-sharp exactness, proceeding with the meticulousness of an outstanding and seasoned scholar.A problem which always accompanies such books is the question: Cui bono? Are either the philosophers... (shrink)

David Bohm published his “Suggested Interpretation of Quantum Theory in Terms of Hidden Variables” some twenty five years after Louis de Broglie first presented his similar Pilot Wave theory of quantum mechanics. In the following 30 years what became known as the de Broglie–Bohm approach to quantum theory was to a large extent ignored within the physics community. Even David Bohm himself became somewhat disillusioned with the lack of impact of his interpretation of quantum theory and he directed his (...) interest elsewhere. But some 27 years after Bohm had published his interpretation of quantum theory, interest was rekindled in part by new, detailed calculations that demonstrated clearly and graphically, exactly how his interpretation explained quantum phenomena in terms of well defined individual particle trajectories. These computations encompassed two-slit interference, quantum tunnelling, neutron interferometry, Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment, orbital and intrinsic angular momentum, quantum measurement and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen nonlocal correlations for orbital angular momentum, intrinsic angular momentum and correlated particle interferometry. Since then, the acceptance of the validity of de Broglie–Bohm theory has steadily grown, as has the interest in the consequences of the approach. For my contribution to the current celebratory volume I was asked to provide a personal review specifically of this novel work within its historical context of the last quarter of the twentieth century. (shrink)

For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant G. Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon - (...) examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Cartesian Origins of the Question Towards the Origins of Occasionalism: Louis de la Forge The Origin of Physical Motion Minds and Bodies Cordemoy and the Cause of Motion Geulincx, Occasionalism and Self‐Consciousness.

Nous entendons réexaminer tout un pan de l’histoire de la philosophie des sciences en France entre le milieu des années 1930 et l’immédiat après-guerre en nous appuyant sur les activités d’un réseau de scientifiques-philosophes qui s’est constitué autour de Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Louis Destouches et Ferdinand Gonseth après le congrès parisien de philosophie scientifique de septembre 1935. Ce réseau officialise sa rupture avec les positivismes logiques en organisant un colloque à Morgat en septembre 1938. Les activités de ce réseau se (...) concrétisent sous l’Occupation avec la publication en 1942 puis en 1944 de deux fascicules qui offrent une large place aux réflexions de Louis de Broglie, Jean-Louis Destouches et Paulette Destouches-Février en physique théorique, tout en traitant d’autres thématiques telles que le langage et le finalisme. Ces deux fascicules reflètent ponctuellement les engagements de l’un de ses membres, à savoir Jean Mariani, en faveur de la Révolution nationale. Si... (shrink)

This volume commemorates the 6th centennial of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a Renaissance polymath whose interests included law, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, mysticism and relations between Christians and non-Christian peoples. The contributors to this volume reflect Cusanus' multiple interests; and, by doing so they commemorate three deceased luminaries of the American Cusanus Society: F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe and Charles Trinkaus. Contributors include: Christopher M. Bellitto, H. Lawrence Bond, Elizabeth Brient, Louis Dupré, Wilhelm Dupré, (...) Walter Andreas Euler, Lawrence Hundersmarck, Thomas M. Izbicki, Dennis D. Martin, Yelena Matusevich, Bernard McGinn, Clyde Lee Miller, Thomas E. Morrissey, Brian A. Pavlac, and Morimichi Watanabe. Publications by Charles Trinkaus: - Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print). (shrink)

Ce recueil d'articles est un temoignage de l'elargissement du domaine d'investigations du Centre de Recherches sur Hegel et l'Idealisme Allemand de Poitiers, qui, sous la direction de Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, s'est attache a mettre l'hegelianisme en debat en le confrontant aux grandes figures philosophiques, depuis Kant jusqu'au dernier Schelling, qui dominerent l'epoque de sa formation, comme de son rayonnement et de sa reception. Il se presente comme un etat des lieux de l'historiographie actuelle, soucieuse d'interroger les grandes oeuvres de la (...) tradition idealiste allemande en les mesurant aux perspectives divergentes ouvertes tant par la phenomenologie husserlienne et heideggerienne que par le cognitivisme et la psychanalyse. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 248-248.

InThe Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth Jennison’sThe Zukofsky (...) Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Gardeseeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle. (shrink)

A compelling idea holds that reality has a layered structure. We often disagree about what inhabits the bottom layer, but we agree that higher up we find chemical, biological, geological, psychological, sociological, economic, /etc./, entities: molecules, human beings, diamonds, mental states, cities, interest rates, and so on. How is this intuitive talk of a layered structure of entities to be understood? Traditionally, philosophers have proposed to understand layered structure in terms of either reduction or supervenience. But these traditional views face (...) well-known problems. A plausible alternative is that layered structure is to be explicated by appeal to explanations of a certain sort, termed / grounding explanations/. Grounding explanations tell us what obtains in virtue of what. Unfortunately, the use of grounding explanations to articulate the layered conception faces a problem, which I call /the collapse/. The collapse turns on the question of how to ground the facts stated by the explanations themselves. In this paper I make a suggestion about how to ground explanations that avoids the collapse. Briefly, the suggestion is that the fact stated by a grounding explanation is grounded in its /explanans/. (shrink)

Two essays, one by Althusser, the other by Balibar which were presented as papers at a seminar on Marx's "Capital" at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1965, and included al.

What role should a citizen's religious convictions play in her political activities? Is she, for example, permitted to decide on the basis of her religious convictions to support laws that criminalize abortion or discourage homosexual relations? Christopher Eberle is deeply at odds with the dominant orthodoxy among political theorists about the relation of religion and politics. His argument is that a citizen may responsibly ground her political commitments on religious beliefs, even if her only reasons for her political commitments (...) are religious in nature. His ideal of citizenship allows citizens to engage in politics without privatizing their religious commitments, and yet does not license mindless and intransigent sectarianism. An inherently controversial book that offers a substantial challenge to political liberalism, it will be read by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, law and religious studies, and general readers seeking insight into the relationship between religious commitments and liberal politics. (shrink)

In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a combination of libertarianism--the view that humans sometimes act freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of nondeterministic processes--and agency reductionism--the view that the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a dominant theory that has (...) similar aims, put forth by well-known philosopher Robert Kane. -/- Many philosophers contend that event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable kind of freedom and responsibility. To Franklin, this position is mistaken. Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains: toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self and its role in the genesis of action. Crucially, if this problem proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism. (shrink)

Christopher G. Timpson provides the first full-length philosophical treatment of quantum information theory and the questions it raises for our understanding of the quantum world. He argues for an ontologically deflationary account of the nature of quantum information, which is grounded in a revisionary analysis of the concepts of information.

Recent work in argumentation theory has emphasized the nature of arguers and arguments along with various theoretical perspectives. Less attention has been given to the third feature of any argumentative situation - the audience. This book fills that gap by studying audience reception to argumentation and the problems that come to light as a result of this shift in focus. Christopher W. Tindale advances the tacit theories of several earlier thinkers by addressing the central problems connected with audience considerations (...) in argumentation, problems that earlier philosophical theories overlook or inadequately accommodate. The main tools employed in exploring the central issues are drawn from contemporary philosophical research on meaning, testimony, emotion and agency. These are then combined with some of the major insights of recent rhetorical work in argumentation to advance our understanding of audiences and suggest avenues for further research. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have challenged the view that evolutionary theory is usefully understood by way of an analogy with Newtonian mechanics. Instead, they argue that evolutionary theory is merely a statistical theory. According to this alternate approach, natural selection and random genetic drift are not even causes, much less forces. I argue that, properly understood, the Newtonian analogy is unproblematic and illuminating. I defend the view that selection and drift are causes in part by attending to a pair of important (...) distinctions—that between process and product and that between natural selection and fitness. (shrink)

Ectogestation involves the gestation of a fetus in an ex utero environment. The possibility of this technology raises a significant question for the abortion debate: Does a woman’s right to end her pregnancy entail that she has a right to the death of the fetus when ectogestation is possible? Some have argued that it does not Mathison & Davis. Others claim that, while a woman alone does not possess an individual right to the death of the fetus, the genetic parents (...) have a collective right to its death Räsänen. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of ectogestation will radically transform the problem of abortion. The argument that I defend purports to show that, even if it is not a person, there is no right to the death of a fetus that could be safely removed from a human womb and gestated in an artificial womb, because there are competent people who are willing to care for and raise the fetus as it grows into a person. Thus, given the possibility of ectogestation, the moral status of the fetus plays no substantial role in determining whether there is a right to its death. (shrink)

The need for quantitative measurement represents a unifying bond that links all the physical, biological, and social sciences. Measurements of such disparate phenomena as subatomic masses, uncertainty, information, and human values share common features whose explication is central to the achievement of foundational work in any particular mathematical science as well as for the development of a coherent philosophy of science. This book presents a theory of measurement, one that is "abstract" in that it is concerned with highly general axiomatizations (...) of empirical and qualitative settings and how these can be represented quantitatively. It was inspired by, and represents a generalization and extension of, the last major research work in this field, Foundations of Measurement Vol. I, by Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky published in 1971. (shrink)

Despite the immense societal importance of ethically designing artificial intelligence, little research on the public perceptions of ethical artificial intelligence principles exists. This becomes even more striking when considering that ethical artificial intelligence development has the aim to be human-centric and of benefit for the whole society. In this study, we investigate how ethical principles are weighted in comparison to each other. This is especially important, since simultaneously considering ethical principles is not only costly, but sometimes even impossible, as developers (...) must make specific trade-off decisions. In this paper, we give first answers on the relative importance of ethical principles given a specific use case—the use of artificial intelligence in tax fraud detection. The results of a large conjoint survey suggest that, by and large, German respondents evaluate the ethical principles as equally important. However, subsequent cluster analysis shows that different preference models for ethically designed systems exist among the German population. These clusters substantially differ not only in the preferred ethical principles but also in the importance levels of the principles themselves. We further describe how these groups are constituted in terms of sociodemographics as well as opinions on artificial intelligence. Societal implications, as well as design challenges, are discussed. (shrink)